A Memorable Evening with Salonen at SFS

As we approach the final month of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), it becomes more and more evident just what we shall be missing with his departure. The program he prepared for this week’s concert spans a century from the early twentieth century to the early 21st. The selections were presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with the first SFS performance of Magnus Lindberg’s “Chorale” (2002), followed by Alban Berg’s 1935 (only) violin concerto. The intermission was then followed by Igor Stravinsky’s first major undertaking for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the score for Michel Fokine’s “The Firebird,” a ballet in one act with two scenes.

Those familiar with Berg’s concerto quickly recognized how Lindberg’s selection served as an overture. This was his personal setting of the Lutheran chorale “Es its genug” (it is enough), the same chorale that Berg had previously deployed in his violin concerto as a reflection on the death of Manon Gropius. Lindberg did not deploy the fierce percussion expletives in Berg’s concerto. Instead, he relied on a rich choir of winds and brass to capture the poignancy of the full text. The solemnity of his rhetoric became the perfect “overture” for the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) of the narrative behind Berg’s concerto.

The concerto soloist was Isabelle Faust. She is no stranger to San Francisco and has consistently taken fearless approaches to engaging undertakings in both concerto and recital settings. If Berg cast his concerto in the abstractions of atonality, Faust knew how to mine expressiveness out of every one of his phrases and cadences. One might think of the music as a contemplation on confronting death, which is not the sort of context one expects for a concerto. Nevertheless, Faust clearly commanded the rhetorical foundation and the wealth of “technical details” that Berg summoned for his memorial rhetoric. Having become quite familiar with this music through both recordings and performances, I came away from Faust’s partnership with Salonen with more appreciation of Berg’s music than I had previously imagined.

Set design for “The Firebird” by Aleksandr Golovin (public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

There is, of course, a wide gulf between the orchestral rhetoric of Berg’s music and that of Stravinsky’s. Nevertheless, both of them were highly skilled in deploying large ensembles. The instrumentation for “The Firebird” is just as rich in diversity as Berg’s. Indeed, it is so rich, it is hard to imagine how it could be crammed into an orchestra pit for a ballet performance!

Fortunately, it was presented last night without a ballet setting. As a result, one could relish the sonorities of every instrument within eyesight, not to mention the menacing trumpets of the monstrous Koschei deployed on audience side. The program sheet provided the full episode-by-episode account of the narrative, and Salonen knew exactly how to manage the pace through those episodes. The triumphant chord progressions of the final “General Thanksgiving” episode provided just the right mood the conclude the evening that had previously confronted the darkness of death.

Taken as a whole, this was an evening of Salonen at his finest.