San Francisco Symphony Gala Concert

Yesterday evening saw the first “official” concert performance in the new season of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). (This was preceded by the concert led by David Afkham one week earlier.) The program was a somewhat abbreviated one, since, as many readers know, the opening night gala involves many more events than the concert itself. However, if the performance was a bit short on duration, conductor Giancarlo Guerrero made sure it was a memorable one.

 

Hilary Hahn as violin soloist for the performance of Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 violin concerto with Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik on the left and, on the right, Giancarlo Guerero conducting from the podium (photograph by Drew Alitzer Photography, courtesy of SFS)

In spite of the brevity, he still prepared a program with the overture-concerto-symphony framework. The second of these selections was, indeed, a concerto and a particularly familiar one at that. Hilary Hahn was the soloist in the performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64, his violin concerto in E minor. The “overture” was “The Chairman Dances,” described by composer John Adams as an “out-take” from his opera Nixon in China. The concluding “symphony” was Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s five-movement Opus 34, “Capriccio espagnol.”

Whatever the festivities of the evening may have been, Guerrero definitely prepared a program for the attentive listener. The same could be said for soloist Hahn, who made her SFS debut when she was a Shenson Young Artist in October of 1999 and was last seen in Davies Symphony Hall when she performed Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 61 violin concerto in D major under the baton of then Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. Her approach to Mendelssohn was straightforward but expressive, and the audience could not have been more enthusiastic. She took that enthusiasm as an invitation for an encore. While it was not announced, I am almost certain that it was the concluding Gigue movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1006.1, the third of his solo violin partitas, composed in the key of E major.

I have discovered that, each time I return to an Adams performance, I discover something new. That was definitely the case with “The Chairman Dances;” and the discovery was a bit more unexpected than usual. It turned out that, roughly in the middle of the composition, Adams decided to have the timpani play in unison with the tuba (not the sort of duo one might expect). I have always appreciated Adams most for his wit, and he probably had a chuckle of his own when he penned these measures into his manuscript!

In the final selection I must confess that, for all of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Russian spirit,” the “Spanish rhetoric” in his Opus 34 could not have been more convincing. Mind you, a Spanish composer might have gone for a bit more transparency in the instrumentation; but the attentive listener is quickly drawn into a drive with which the movements flow from one to the next. Guerrero knew exactly how to capture this spirit, and the audience could not have been more enthusiastic with the results. Personally, I have to wonder if the composer himself had a bit of fun as the movements from this “mini-suite” flowed from the ink of his pen!

As far as the audience was concerned, that enthusiasm probably contributed to working up an appetite for what would follow!