Salonen’s Engaging Command of Bruckner’s 4th

Last night Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony in the first of the three performances of the penultimate program for the current subscription season. The “lion’s share” of the program took place after the intermission with a performance of Anton Bruckner’s WAB 104, his fourth symphony in E-flat major. Bruckner himself endowed this symphony with a subtitle: “Romantic.” Those familiar with the Bruckner canon know that many of his compositions were revised and reworked, leading to multiple editions. Last night’s performance used Leopold Nowak’s edition based on the composer’s final version of the score, which he completed in 1880.

Salonen has a keen ear for the overall pace of a Bruckner symphony. For the most part, the conductor tended to shy away from rapidity. Nevertheless, when properly conducted, there is always a clear sense of moving forward, even if the pace is restrained. Salonen’s approach to that pace could not have been more satisfying, right up there with my past encounters with Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt (as well as Blomstedt’s recordings of all of the symphonies). That attention to pace allows the attentive listener to appreciate the many ways in which the thematic content twists and turns its way among the full palette of “instrumental colors.”

Listening to Bruckner is not like listening to the intricate interplay of the themes that one encounters in the orchestral music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms. Bruckner’s subjects are more straightforward, but their unfolding emerges through instrumental coloration. One might say that there is not much variation in the building blocks, but you keep looking at them from different points of view. Those points of view unfold over the course of prolonged time frames, making the act of listening one of ongoing discovery.

According to my records, this was my second encounter with Salonen conducting Bruckner, the first having taken place in February of last year with the performance of WAB 106, the sixth symphony in A major. I would be only too happy to have him guide me through more of this composer’s symphonic repertoire. Given that his tenure will be concluding soon, I fear that future encounters are likely to be few, if any at all.

Pianist Yefim Bronfman (photograph by Dario Acosta, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony)

The first half of the program saw the return of pianist Yefim Bronfman as concerto soloist. The concerto was a familiar one: Robert Schumann’s Opus 54 in A minor. As usual, Bronfman was both energetic and expressive; and his chemistry with not only Salonen but also the members of the orchestra could not have been better. As expected, he returned with an encore that was probably familiar to many listeners, the fifth (in the key of G minor) of the ten preludes that Sergei Rachmaninoff collected for his Opus 23. Both concerto and encore provided just the right “warm-up” for the journey that would follow after the intermission.