Cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason (photograph by Ollie Ali, courtesy of SFS)
Last night cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason returned to Davies Symphony Hall. He had made his debut there with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, in a performance of Edward Elgar’s cello concerto in October of 2022. This time he made his debut in the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Orchestral Series, performing with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. His selection was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 107, a late work (1959) but the composer’s first of two cello concertos.
The music reflects the high spirits of a composer that had successfully outlived Joseph Stalin. The opening rhetoric is unabashedly playful, complete with prankish outbursts from the timpani. The four movements (including a cadenza) are played without interruption; and Kanneh-Mason was clearly as much at home with the lyrical Moderato as he was with the pranks in the opening Allegretto. Sadly, he did not announce his encore selection, but its Adagio rhetoric provided the perfect balance for Shostakovich’s energetic rhetoric. [added 6/14, 1:25 p.m.:
The encore was not by Shostakovich but by his colleague, Mieczysław Weinberg. In 1968 Weinberg composed a set of 24 preludes for solo cello, which became his Opus 100. Unlike the piano preludes of Frédéric Chopin, these were not organized by key signature. Kanneh-Mason played the eighteenth prelude in the collection.]
The intermission was followed by the first SFS performance of Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Fairytale Poem,” which was composed in 1971. Salonen provided introductory remarks, including the narrative of the fortunes of a piece of chalk, which dreams of making elaborate images. Gubaidulina has not been shy about irony; and, as might be expected, the music concludes as the chalk dissolves in its final strokes.
The subtlety of that narrative provided a sharp contrast to the overblown dramatics encountered in Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s tone poem “Francesca da Rimini.” This is based on an episode in Dante’s Inferno, and the listener would have done well to abandon all hope. Anyone familiar with the Tchaikovsky repertoire is well aware of his tendency to repeat himself; but, in this case, he did it to aggravating excess. This is the composer’s Opus 32, written in 1876, by which time he had established himself as a mature composer; but it seems as if he never really got his head around this particular Dante episode.
Fortunately, we could leave Davies with memories of Shostakovich’s high spirits in his “post-Stalin” period!
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