Last Sunday afternoon, Dave and I went to Davies Hall to hear MTT conducting the San Francisco Symphony in a terrific performance of Gustav Mahler’s melancholy Das Lied von der Erde. It’s not a work I know well at all; I’ve heard it in concert only once before, and I don’t recall ever listening to it much on recordings.

I enjoyed the performance a lot. The work is a series of songs for alto and tenor (according to Mahler’s score, a baritone can sing the alto part an octave lower, but he apparently thought it would be too unseemly for a soprano to sing the rowdier tenor part, which contains songs praising wine and drunkenness, an octave higher).

I’m a words person more than a music person, and so as much of my pleasure was in the texts as it was in the music. The poems are German translations (very loosely) of a number of Chinese poems. Mahler himself made some changes to the German poems to make the words fit better with the music he wanted to write, and then the German poems themselves were not translated directly from the Chinese but from a French translation of the Chinese. Dave sent me the link to a website that has all four versions of the poems: Chinese originals, French translations, German translations of the French, and Mahler’s versions. Looks fascinating, and I hope to get into it as I have time.

The performance was very good. The orchestra was huge — they had more musicians crowded onto the stage than I remember ever seeing before. The music was clear and vivid and eloquently conducted. The singers were good; the tenor Simon O’Neill especially. The vocal parts can’t be easy: The work would seem to call for more of a Lieder style of singing, where communicating the poetry with nuance and detail is as important as singing beautifully; yet the way Mahler wrote the music, the singer is sometimes accompanied by the whole orchestra playing loudly, and in that kind of situation it’s difficult for the singer to do much more than just be heard at all. Mr. O’Neill, I thought, handled it well, making a good loud sound when needed and giving attention to the subtleties in the poetry when he could. The mezzo-soprano, Sasha Cooke, has a lovely, strong sound, but even when the orchestra was hushed and she could be clearly heard, one couldn’t really tell what words she was singing. Many of her vowels sounded a lot more Italian than German, at least to my ear, and many of her consonants were inaudible. Oh well. There are certainly music lovers who prefer it that way.

Dave tells me that Das Lied was written after Mahler had learned about his wife’s affair with the architect Walter Gropius; he was shattered by it (though, really, Dave has showed me a few of Mahler’s letters to his wife, and they are so patronizing and controlling of her — in one, he explains why it’s bad for her character to be reading the plays of Ibsen, and recommends to her that she stop! — that it’s not hard to see why she might have been feeling increasingly claustrophic in her marriage to him and inclined to rebel sometimes). And then it was another blow for him to lose one of his young daughters to scarlet fever, and yet another to learn that he himself had a heart condition that required him to give up everything strenuous, and which might cause him to die relatively young anyway (and it did, just a few years later at the age of fifty, after a month of hard work conducting and touring with the New York Philharmonic). So Dave says that Das Lied was Mahler’s farewell to his wife, to his daughter, and to life itself.

So now I’ve got a 1960 recording conducted by Bruno Walter, which Dave recommended, on my smartphone, and I’m listening to it and getting to know it better.

Last Friday Dave and I went to Davies Symphony Hall to hear the San Francisco Symphony play a new work by Ted Hearne called Dispatches, Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony 6, Pathétique. A young composer named Christian Reif conducted the Hearne piece, and Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the other two.

Dispatches is scored for a large orchestra including lots of unusual percussion (including various kinds of drums and cymbals, glockenspiel, ratchet, Thai gongs, marimba, xylophone, wood blocks, and — according to the program — a “set of kitchen knives”) as well as electric guitar and electric bass. The music was full of interesting and unexpected sound combinations, but I found it hard to detect much structure running through it. I’m sure it was there, but it seemed to me to be obscured rather than made clearer by the controlled chaos of the orchestration. It was rather like listening to a kid with a brand new box of 64 musical crayons who was determined to use all of them in one picture.

Knoxville was beautifully played and sung. The soprano, Susanna Phillips, has a beautiful, rich voice, but she could have been singing in Hawaiian for all the consonants I could make out, and while the text (words by James Agee) was printed in the program, the house lights were brought down nearly all the way so that it wasn’t possible to follow along. You could appreciate the wonderful music during the performance, and then appreciate the wonderful text afterward during intermission, but you couldn’t appreciate both together at the same time. So that was a shame. Still, beautifully played and sung.

The program ended with a terrific performance of the Pathétique. It’s a very familiar work, but MTT nevertheless found some ear-opening new aspects to bring out. He played down the romantic side of it; I don’t think I’ve ever heard the first movement played so bleakly, so that even the Big Theme sounded like something out of Sibelius. I have heard the big march in the third movement played as sincerely triumphant, as ironic, as desperate, but I think this was the first time I’ve heard it sound angry and rigidly defiant.

Dave and I went back to Davies last night for the second of two concerts with Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. All in all, I felt it was a more consistently enjoyable concert than the night before, though nothing in it pleased me quite as much as the Suk Serenade had. The program featured another two keyboard concertos by J.S. Bach, this time flanked by two works for strings by Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s Concerto in D for String Orchestra opened the first half, followed by Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1. The second half began with Bach’s relatively brief Keyboard Concerto No. 5, followed by Stravinsky’s ballet Apollon Musagète. The keyboard concertos were a lot of fun; the problems of balance between piano and orchestra from the night before were gone, and Mr. Denk and the string players all seemed to be listening to each other and playing off each other in a way they hadn’t the night before. The Stravinsky works are not among my favorite ones, but both got bright, rich performances. Good stuff.

Last night Dave and I heard Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields playing Josef Suk’s Serenade for Strings, two J.S. Bach keyboard concertos, and Antonín Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings.

The best came first: Suk’s Serenade was just drop-dead stunning, beautifully nuanced, lovely rich tone from all the string sections, played with all kinds of care and attention to detail.

Bach’s Keyboard Concerto no. 2 was a lot less wonderful. The orchestra sounded great, and Mr. Denk sounded great when he was playing alone, but whenever they were playing together, things got muddy. Mr. Denk played with a lot of rhythmic freedom in contrast to the orchestra, which played in strict tempo; this might give a appealingly jazzy, improvisational feel to the music if it were played on a harpsichord and/or played in a smaller, less reverberant hall, but on a grand piano in the huge space that is Davies Hall, it more often just sounded blurred. Dave hypothesized that perhaps they hadn’t been able to rehearse much in the hall beforehand because of the chamber music concert that afternoon, so hadn’t had a chance to adjust to the acoustics of the hall.

After intermission, the Keyboard Concerto no. 4 was much better. Mr. Denk played with a bit less rubato, and the orchestra dropped down to a whisper of a pianissimo whenever the piano was playing over them, and the result was much clearer. Still not the dry sound of Bach that I’m used to, and it lacked a sense of conversation going on between the soloist and orchestra that I tend to expect in Bach, but it was enjoyable enough.

With Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings, though, we were back to wonderfulness again, with all the same beauty and care that had made the Suk so glorious. I do hope they get around to recording these pieces, if they haven’t already — particularly the Suk, as it’s not done very often.

As an encore, the Academy performed a lively piece that sounded like it must be by Percy Grainger, but we’re not sure what it was.

Later: Dave finally figured out what the encore was: the last movement of Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite.

Last night we heard Ton Koopman conduct the SF Symphony in Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music and Haydn’s Sinfonia Concertante and Symphony 103 (the “Drumroll”). It was a pleasant but not memorable concert. The Fireworks Music and the Sinfonia Concertante are lightweight works at best anyway (IMO, at least). But the Drumroll is a favorite of mine, and I was hoping for a more polished and powerful performance from SFS than they gave. The symphony got off to a bad start with a small but embarrassing flub in the opening drumroll, and the small glitches continued — a slightly sour note in the horns here, a slightly ragged entrance from the strings there, the double basses too loud during one section, and so on. Still, what we heard the was first of four performances of this program, so maybe it’ll gain in crispness at later performances. Anyway, an enjoyable enough night out, but not a concert to remember.

The older couple to my right really enjoyed it, though. They spent much of the concert cleverly waving their hands in time to the music to give the illusion that they were the ones actually conducting the orchestra. So droll!

The SF Symphony is trying out a new plan that lets us pay a lump sum at the beginning of the month and then get last-minute tickets for most concerts that haven’t sold out. Dave and I were on the list to be offered it, probably because we have been such heavy and regular users of their annual discounted ticket offer. We figured that if we used the offer to attend at least three concerts a month, we’d break even, and there were easily at least three concerts a month we’d like to see (heck, there are easily twice that many), so we signed up. It does eat up most of our entertainment budget for the month, but it’s also a great deal for us. So we’ve been going to a lot of concerts the last month and a half.

A Friday evening a couple weeks ago was Herbert Blomstedt conducting Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem. This is a great piece and a favorite of both Dave’s and mine (I sang the bass part twice way back in my singing days, and understudied the baritone solos one of those times, so its a work I got to know pretty closely). It was a rather lackluster performance, however — not bad, exactly, but it wasn’t up to the usual high standards of the SF Symphony so it was disappointing. The orchestra’s playing was often a bit ragged; worse, Blomstedt’s tempos were tepid, relentlessly moderate even in the sections of the requiem that should be spirited and joyous.

I did like the baritone soloist, Christian Gerhaher, a lot, partly because of his attention to the words. I really love the texts Brahms chose for this work, and Mr. Gerhaher’s diction was very crisp and clear, though he does sing with a Bavarian accent that took me a few phrases to get used to; however, he comes by it naturally as a native of Munich.

The strongest part of the performance was the chorus itself, clearly well prepared by chorus director Ragnar Bohlin. In fact, the highlight of the entire concert for me was the unaccompanied motet (Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen) they sang before the intermission; the piece was new to me and the performance was full of spirit and emotion.

A few days later on Sunday evening we heard pianist András Schiff playing four late piano sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Schubert. This was the second of three concerts on this theme; we heard the first of them last week, but I was in a very dark mood and couldn’t concentrate much on the music. I was in better spirits this week and enjoyed the concert. I know very little about piano music, though, and all four sonatas were new to me, so I don’t have much to say about them.

Mr. Schiff is an amazing pianist. So much careful and intelligent attention to clarity and nuance, and all in the service of making transparent the structure of the pieces! Everything clean and clear as crystal. Not a lot of power and drive, though, even in the Beethoven, which I have to imagine must usually be played more forcefully. But everything was beautifully and thoughtfully shaped. Even though I was hearing the pieces for the first time, and even though I’m not really all that deeply musical, I was able to follow quite a bit of their structure, something that would ordinarily take me two or three listenings just to start to get.

Interesting, too, to hear him so soon after hearing Ms. Grimaud the week before, one very classical and finely polished in style and the other very romantic and energetic, both excellent but in very different ways.

Dave and I went back Monday evening to hear Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic in Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite and Piano Concerto in G (with Hélène Grimaud again as soloist) and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. I don’t know the Mother Goose Suite well at all, while the other two pieces are old favorites of mine, so it seemed like an attractive program, and of course we’d had a great time just the night before at the first of their two concerts.

The evening got off to an unpleasant start, though. Dave and I usually sit in the second tier, where the sound is best and the tickets are cheap, but for reasons I won’t go into we were able to take any as-yet-unsold seats, and the guy in the box office talked us into going for the loge. The loge, though, is a pricey section, and on our way to our seats we got a big helping of Snotty Attitude from the usher. Whether it was because we weren’t in expensive business suits or were two men attending together or are a racially mixed couple or some combination of these things, or whether our need to ask for clarification about which section of seats she had meant to indicate with that vague flip of her hand branded us as being interlopers in this upscale neighborhood, I don’t know, but the usher made sure everyone in hearing distance knew that as far as she was concerned We Didn’t Belong There. Another usher apologized to me for this — “we aren’t all like that,” she added in a whisper. But Dave tells me that he has gotten similar treatment from ushers in the loge a number of times before, and I was in a black mood when I took my seat. Fortunately we still had 20 minutes or so before the concert began, so I could lose myself in a crossword puzzle for a while and regain my even temperament before the concert started.

The Mother Goose Suite was enchanting — graceful and nuanced and shimmering and all that. The Piano Concerto was terrific, too, very sassy and full of spirit. Best of all, I thought, was the vivid, fiery performance of the Prokofiev. Mr. Nézet-Séguin took over the Rotterdam Philharmonic from Valery Gergiev and is evidently carrying on Mr. Gergiev’s fierce and intense style of music-making; I thought it suited the Prokofiev particularly well.

The loge seats turned out to have very good sound, though not quite as good as the second tier (the first and second violins were a little hard to hear from where we were sitting, though I also have to say that I hadn’t consciously noticed this until Dave pointed it out to me at intermission), and being closer to the stage meant we had a very good view of Ms. Grimaud’s hands flying around on the keyboard during the concerto. Next time, though, I’ll have to remember to wear an expensive business suit.