DSO Live-Streams Russian Program

Once again my wife and I had our dinner while watching the latest live-streamed performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). The title of the program was Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” and Other Tales, but I would have preferred to call the event a “Russian excursion.” Three of the four composers on the program were Russian, each with a different background. In “order of appearance,” they were Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The first composer on the program was John Adams; but he was represented by “Slonimsky’s Earbox,” named after the Russian-American musicologist who may be best known for the throughly engaging book he wrote entitled Lexicon of Musical Invective.

Cellist Wei Yu performing Shostakovich’s concerto (screen shot from yesterday’s live-stream)

The program was led by the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu, who had a solid command in approaching all four of the composers. The concerto soloist was DSO Principal Cello Wei Yu, performing Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 107, the first of his two cello concertos, composed in the key of E-flat major. The second half of the program began with Stravinsky’s poéme symphonique, “Le chant du rossignol” (song of the nightingale), followed by selections from Tchaikovsky’s full-length ballet Swan Lake. All of these offerings were richly orchestrated; and, as is usually the case with these telecasts, the camera work guided the viewer through the panoply of diverse instrumental sonorities.

The performance was consistently satisfying from start to finish. Lintu knew just how to capture the brash rhetoric of Adams’ overture. I was fortunate enough to see Slonimsky “in action” with his coy but always perceptive rhetoric. I would like to believe that Adams was just as fortunate, because his music definitely aroused my own personal memories of the musicologist.

Nevertheless, the concerto was the high point of the evening; and the soloist’s command of the extended cadenza was nothing less than jaw-dropping. I would have thought that he had enough by the conclusion of his performance, but he returned to given an encore. This was the opening Prelude movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1012 (sixth) solo cello suite (which always seems to remind me of “The Irish Washerwoman”).

“Le chant du rossignol” is based on one of the more poignant fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson. Stravinsky composed a full-length opera based on this tale, and the tone poem is basically a distillation of the opera. The distilled version is as engaging as it is brief, and I am somewhat disappointed that the music does not receive more attention. (The last time I wrote about it was in September of 2016, when Michael Tilson Thomas conducted a performance by the San Francisco Symphony.) The instrumentation shows Stravinsky at his best, and those qualities were excellently captured by last night’s camera work.

Given that my writing career (so to speak) began in my efforts as a ballet critic, I am still more than familiar with the full score of Swan Lake. It is usually abbreviated down to the music for the second of the four acts for concert purposes. However, Lintu assembled a suite of his own that accounted for all of those acts (but not with any regard for the narrative). He began with the prologue for the second act (because that is the most familiar music); but this was followed by the waltz in the first act. While his selections did not provide much of an account of the narrative, where this performance is concerned, there was no need to do so!

DSQ’s Stravinsky-Schnittke Connection

Last night the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) made its third visit to Herbst Theatre to perform a recital presented by San Francisco Performances. Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen took the leadership chair with Frederik Øland on second violin, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. Much of the program was devoted to traditional Nordic music; and, to politely suggest that they have been keeping up with news about our President, many of those selections originated in Greenland.

This attention to folk music was preceded by works of two major twentieth-century composers, Igor Stravinsky and Alfred Schnittke. The contrast could not have been more engaging. Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne consists of selected movements from the ballet “Pulcinella,” whose score appropriated compositions by Giovanni Pergolesi. The composer clearly enjoyed having his way with eighteenth-century Italian tradition, and his instrumentation had some raucous moments to underscore the ballet’s narrative. DSQ provided its own arrangement of the suite’s movements, which may not have been quite as raucous but were still high-spirited.

Photograph of Alfred Schnittke in Moscow taken by Dmitri N. Smirnov, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

This was followed by Schnittke’s second string quartet. This composition also had a “background source” in the form of Russian church music. However, the composer’s capacity for intense dissonance tended to override any reflections on liturgical traditions. The thorns in Schnittke’s music are long and sharp, and I must confess that it took a fair amount of listening experience for me to begin to find my way through his string quartets. Nevertheless, last night it was clear that DSQ had a firm command of Schnittke’s unforgiving rhetorical stances. Now that I am more familiar with those stances, I could appreciate the intensity of DSQ’s interpretation of his music.

DSQ to Balance Traditional Music with 20C

The members of DSQ, “three Danes and one Norwegian cellist” (from the event page for their next SFP recital)

Next month the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) will return to Herbst Theatre for another recital presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). The members of the ensemble have not changed since their last visit: violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who share the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. This will be their first appearance since their last visit in the fall of 2022, when they prepared a program for SFP consisting of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, and Benjamin Britten with an encore by Joseph Haydn.

This time, the second half of the program will be devoted to arrangements of traditional Nordic music, prepared collectively by the four members of the quartet. The program will begin with another of their arrangements, this time of music by Igor Stravinsky. Suite italienne consisted of compositions by Giambattista Pergolesi that Stravinsky had appropriated for his score for the one-act ballet “Pulcinella.” DSQ rearranged this orchestral suite for string quartet. As a result, there will be only one composer on the program whose music was not arranged. That will be Alfred Schnittke, whose second string quartet will be performed after the Stravinsky arrangement.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 14. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, which many (most?) readers know is located in the heart of the Civic Center at 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices will be $85, $75, and $65. As those readers probably also know, SFP has created a Web page for purchasing those tickets.

Second OFS Concert will be “Supernatural”

OFS violinists on the banner for the Web page for the One Found Sound Supernatural program

Early next month will see the second of the four concerts to be presented during the thirteenth season of One Found Sound (OFS). Many (most?) readers know that this ensemble calls itself the “conductorless, collaborative, chamber orchestra,” which has cultivated a consistently engaging repertoire that spans from the Baroque period of Johann Sebastian Bach to the “immediate present.” The title of next month’s program will be Supernatural, presenting “an evening of sound inspired by the natural world and what lies just beyond it.”

The span of this particular program will not go all the way “back to Bach.” Rather, the “time line” will begin in the nineteenth century with Felix Mendelssohn’s Op. Posth. 90, his fourth symphony in A major, known as his “Italian” symphony. The program will begin with a twentieth-century selection, Igor Stravinsky’s Concerto in E-flat for chamber orchestra, given a subtitle named after the Dumbarton Oaks estate building in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Two “natural” compositions will be situated between these “bookends.” One of them will be Missy Mazzoli’s “Violent, Violent Sea;” and the other will be “Wings,” composed by Darian Donovan Thomas for electronics along with the instrumentation.

This concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 7. The venue will be familiar to those who have attended past OFS concerts, Heron Arts in SoMa, located at 7 Heron Street on the block between 7th Street and 8th Street, All tickets are being sold for $30. They may be purchased online through a Ticket Tailor event page.

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.

SFS: More Rich Sonorities from Guerrero

Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero (photograph by Lukasz Rajchert taken on February 4, 2020, from Guerrero’s Web site)

Last night Giancarlo Guerrero returned to Davies Symphony Hall for his third visit to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). His last visit took place almost exactly two years ago, at the end of May in 2023. The high point of that visit was his delivery of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Opus 35 symphonic suite Scheherazade with a solid command of the full complement of instruments in the orchestra.

That command was in full force again last night, exercising the entire forces of the SFS ensemble for all they were worth. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to the two best-known tone poems of Ottorino Respighi, “Fountains of Rome,” composed in 1916, followed by his 1924 “Pines of Rome.” (He would compose “Roman Festivals” in 1928 to complete his “Roman trilogy.”) Instrumental sonorities were just as rich in the first half with Igor Stravinsky’s 1947 version of the complete score for the one-act ballet “Petrushka.” (Stravinsky would revise his works when the copyright ran out in the interest in maintaining a flow of royalties!) The program began the full-ensemble spirit with the first SFS performance of “Asteroid 4179: Toutatis,” composed by Kaija Saariaho in 2005.

Guerrero clearly enjoys working a large orchestra for all it is worth. One can see it in the joyfulness of his body language. However, it is just as clear that he wants to make sure that every last detail will register in the minds of the attentive listeners. Whether or not the music he was conducting was familiar to many (if not most) in the audience, there was a freshness in his approach that made even the most familiar passages feel like a journey of discovery. Thus, whether it was a first-encounter with music of Saariaho or works by Respighi and Stravinsky found in just about every collection of recordings, Guerrero knew how to get his listeners to sit up and take notice. I am already looking forward to what he will plan for his next visit!

SFS: Update to Next Month’s Guerrero Program

Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero (from the Web page providing details for the SFS concert he will conduct)

Last summer, when I wrote my article about the conductors that would visit the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) during the current season, I was interested enough in Giancarlo Guerrero that I included his photograph! That program was given the title Talent & Phoenix, which was also the title of a work that Gabriel Kahane composed on an SFS commission that had been scheduled for performance under Guerrero’s baton. (This struck me as important enough that I included a photograph of Guerrero in my article!)

Sadly, the performance of this work has been postponed to a future date not yet announced. The good news, however, is that the program will still begin with the first SFS performance of Kaija Saariaho’s “Asteroid 4179: Toutatis.” The second half of the program will still present Ottorino Respighi’s “Fountains of Rome,” which will now be coupled with “Pines of Rome.” (Those familiar with the latter will know that it will bring the entire program to a roaring conclusion!) In the first half of the program, Saariaho’s composition will be followed by the 1947 version of the music that Igor Stravinsky composed for Michel Fokine’s one-act ballet in four “tableaux,” “Petrushka.”

As most readers probably already know, this performance will take place in Davies Symphony Hall. The address is 201 Van Ness Avenue; but it occupies the entire block with Van Ness to the west, Franklin Street to the east, Hayes Street to the south, and Grove Street to the north. The entrance is on the Grove Street side, which is also where tickets may be purchased at the Box Office. Tickets are currently available at prices from $49 in the Second Tier to $149 in the Orchestra and Boxes. (Tickets for the Terrace areas behind the stage are not currently available for this event.) A Web page has been created for online purchases. Tickets may also be purchased by calling the SFS Box Office at 415-864-6000.

Salonen and SFS in Top Form for Stravinsky

Last night San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to Davies Symphony Hall with a performance that left many of us feeling sorry that this would be his final season as the ensemble’s leader. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Igor Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring” (“Le Sacre du printemps”), which, according to my records, he had previously performed almost exactly three years ago. I have been hooked on this music since my secondary school days when it was one of my earliest score purchases. The fact is, however, that there is so much in that score that even the most attentive listener can come back after many past encounters and still find new discoveries.

As was the case during Salonen’s last performance, my eyes were guided by not only memories of previous listening experiences but also his different approaches to leading the full ensemble through the plethora of notes (and comments) that Stravinsky had injected into his score. Since I now know “what happens next” almost entirely by heart, I was free to guide my attention to factors such as how Salonen managed the many erratic rhythms or figuring out which instrumentalists provided some of the most outlandish sonorities. Once again, the performance of this music left me overwhelmed and exhilarated.

Pianist Daniil Trifonov (photograph by Dario Acosta, courtesy of SFS)

This was particularly significant since the first half was so disappointing that I actually toyed with leaving at the intermission! The concerto soloist was Daniil Trifonov performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 16 (second) piano concerto in G minor. I first encountered this concerto rather late in life with several different pianists taking variety of different approaches. Ironically, one of those approaches took me to Trifonov’s Silver Age album, on which he performed the concerto with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev; and the two of them were worth of the epithet “dynamic duo!”

Sadly, that did not apply to Trifonov’s encounter with Salonen last night. It did not take long for the impression to form that Trifonov was using his fingers as sledge hammers. Mind you, Prokofiev was not shy about aggressive rhetoric; but Trifonov cranked that aggression up to eleven! Fortunately, Salonen’s command of the instrumentation provided the attentive listener with at least some compensation for last night’s “keyboard massacre.”

Even more disappointing, however, was the opening selection, “Strange Beasts” by Xavier Muzik. The composer was commissioned by the Emerging Black Composers Project, as well as SFS; and this was its world premiere performance. The music was performed against projections of photographs by the composer of his native Los Angeles (some of which were deliberately displayed upside down). Sadly, there was more of substance to engage the eyes than there was for the ears. The music muddled its way around for about a quarter of an hour, but it felt like forever.

Fortunately (to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart), we’ll always have Stravinsky!

Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” in Detroit

A “picture of pagan Russia,” one of Nicholas Roerich’s designs for the first ballet performance of “The Rite of Spring” (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Early yesterday evening my wife and I settled in over dinner to watch the latest “free live HD webcast” presented by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). Some readers may recall that our last encounter took place this past November, when Music Director Jader Bignamini led a compelling program that coupled Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken I/100 in G major (often known as the “Military” symphony) with Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony. Yesterday DSO presented a Russian program led by Daniele Rustioni. The second half was devoted entirely to Igor Stravinsky’s music for “The Rite of Spring,” a ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky to evoke the score’s subtitle “Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts.”

There is probably a consensus that this is one of the most significant works to be composed in the twentieth century. It even attracted the attention of Walt Disney (who, probably working with Leopold Stokowski, unfortunately butchered the score to suit his cartoon narrative). However, for all of this music’s familiarity, it was given a fresh and engaging account under Rustioni’s baton. As usual, the video direction guided the viewer through the different “sites of action” in the score; and it is clear that the crew was as well-rehearsed for the score as the performers were. Thus, I found that, however, familiar that score was to me, I could enjoy every moment of the freshness that Rustioni brought to his interpretation.

The other Russian composer accounted for the concerto selection in the first half of yesterday’s program. The soloist was violinist Francesca Dego (making her DSO debut), performing Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 77 (99), his first violin concerto in A minor. It was dedicated to the Russian violinist David Oistrakh. If the Guinness World Records had a category for “longest solo instrumental cadenza,” Opus 77 would probably be the undisputed winner. It follows up on the retrospective dignity of a passacaglia at a stately Andante tempo, forming a lengthy bridge preparing the listener for the final raucous burlesque movement.

Dego’s command of that cadenza was nothing short of jaw-dropping, allowing it to unfold with more than enough clarity to keep the attentive listener on the edge of his/her seat. She then announced that her encore would be a capriccio by Grażyna Bacewicz, but she did not say which one. (Bacewicz composed six of them.)

The “overture” for the program was Camille Pépin’s “Les Eaux célestes” (celestial waters). My guess is that most of the audience quickly recognized that the composer had taken Debussy as her point of departure. However, given the nature of the title itself, one can appreciate that the composer’s intention was to evoke, rather than describe. The good news is that the music did not go on for too long but left me hoping to encounter further listening experiences.

Simon Rattle in Berlin: Schoenberg and Stravinsky

Simon Rattle on the cover of one of his Stravinsky albums (from the Amazon.com Web page for the single-disc release)

Readers familiar with the history of music in the twentieth century may accuse me of being a bit prankish in my decision to couple Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky in a single article accounting for performances by the Berlin Philharmonic led by Simon Rattle. Both of them spent the last years of their lives in Los Angeles County. However, as far as I can tell, the two of them were never in the same place at the same time (at least knowingly)! Indeed, the closest they ever came involved the fact that Robert Craft worked with both of them and may well have engaged in conversations in which each asked about the other! Thus, in accounting for the new Rattle anthology released by Warner Classics, I decided to take a compare-and-contrast approach to the two individuals that were clearly leading figures in the history of twentieth-century music.

Sadly, the grounds for comparison are more limited than I would have wished. Stravinsky is represented by only two CDs, while Schoenberg has three, one of which includes music that he arranged, rather than composed. Furthermore, each composer went through a series of stages, each of which involved a different approach to composition; and, in neither case, is the full extent of those stages given a fair shake. However, as is always the case where “the business” is concerned, one must work with what one has; and I shall try to do my best in accounting for both of these “rival” composers on this new anthology.

As is often the case such anthologies, I tend to follow where my strongest memories lead me. Therefore, I would like to begin with Stravinsky’s rather innovative approach to composing symphonies. After his initial undertaking, the 1905 symphony in E-flat (sometimes identified as his Opus 1), Stravinsky put the very idea of a symphony aside for over a decade. After that, each of his compositions had its own unique qualities, which reflected what he thought a “symphony” should be. The first of these was the 1920 “Symphonies of Wind Instruments.” Ten years later he composed the “Symphony of Psalms;” and, in the following decade, he composed the “Symphony in C” (1940) and the “Symphony in Three Movements” (1945).

In the Warner collection, the “Symphonies of Wind Instruments” is situated between “Le Sacre du printemps” and “Apollon musagète.” All three of these were recorded in concerts on dates very distant from each other; and my guess is that the producers (Stephen Johns and Christoph Franke) had a “compare and contrast” album in mind. Nevertheless, these are all early compositions, even though the two ballet scores were recorded using their respective 1947 revisions. (Stravinsky seems to have known how to keep his checkbook healthy when a copyright was about to expire!)

The other three symphonies are grouped on a separate CD but not ordered chronologically. Nevertheless, they do account for the composer’s “later thoughts” about what he wanted a symphony to be; and I, for one, enjoyed listening to how they had been grouped when the CD was pressed. On the other hand, where the ballet scores are concerned, I think that I still prefer listening to the recordings that Stravinsky himself made.

Schoenberg is represented by only three original compositions. However, the first of these is also his longest! Gurrelieder requires both solo vocal and choral resources, and its full duration requires two CDs. I actually purchased this as a two-CD set when it was first released. I felt that listening to this music frequently would be the only way I could get my head around what had struck me as a sprawling undertaking. I never quite succeeded, but there are definitely moments that still send a chill down my spine, particularly when they are sung by Karita Mattila!

Another work that requires a fair amount of exposure before the listener begins to appreciate the content is the first (Opus 9) chamber symphony. This was subsequently rescored for a full orchestra (still keeping “chamber” in the title), published as Opus 9b. Personally, I still prefer the original version; but Rattle seems to have found just the right way to guide the attentive listener through the orchestral version’s plethora of enigmatic cadences. Where that genre is concerned, I was far more satisfied with Opus 34. The full title of this composition (including the parenthesis) is “Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Drohende Gefahr, Angst, Katastrophe),” which translates as “Accompaniment Music for a Light Play [as in “the interactive play of lights] Scene (Threatening Danger, Fear, Catastrophe).” All of those parenthetical qualities are clearly evident, and one does not need visual stimuli to reinforce them!

The remaining Schoenberg selection is his orchestration of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 25 (first) piano quartet, composed in the key of G minor. Schoenberg clearly had fun in deploying instrumental qualities that one would never encounter in Brahms’ own orchestral undertakings. Nevertheless, it is clear that, in composing the concluding “Ronda alla Zingarese” movement, the composer wanted to have some fun; and I always break out in a grin when Schoenberg deploys a xylophone to add to the “fun factor!”

Schoenberg really did have a sense of humor. (The family car had a horn that was tuned to play the opening motif of his second string quartet.) On the recordings that he made in Berlin, Rattle seems to have an effective grasp on the composer’s full extent of dispositions!

SFB will Revisit Three Next@90 Ballets

Parker Garrison (rear) and Myles Thatcher in “MADCAP” (© RJ Muna for San Francisco Ballet)

The San Francisco Ballet will begin next month with a program of encore performances of three of the works given world premiere performances last season during the next@90 festival. One of those offerings will be Yuri Possokhov’s “Violin Concerto.” He described his effort as bring “fresh eyes” to George Balanchine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto;” and I came away from seeing this new work performed in January of last year with nothing but positive feelings about the choreographer’s distinctive merits. Next month’s program will also include one of the other ballets premiered on that January program, Nicolas Blanc’s “Gateway to the Sun.” The third work on the program will be Danielle Rowe’s “MADCAP,” setting carnival-inspired music by Pär Hagström orchestrated by Philip Feeney.

Like the other program that will be presented this month, this “revival” program will be given seven performances with dates and times as follows:

• Tuesday, April 2, 7:30 p.m.
• Wednesday, April 3, 7:30 p.m.
• Friday, April 5, 7:30 p.m.
• Sunday, April 7, 2 p.m.
• Thursday, April 11, 7:30 p.m.
• Saturday, April 12, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

All performances will take place in the War Memorial Opera House, which is on the northwest corner of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street (across MTT Way from Davies Symphony Hall). Ticket prices start at $29, and a single Web page has been created for purchasing tickets for all of the above dates and times. Tickets may also be purchased at the Box Office in the outer lobby of the Opera House or by calling 415-865-2000. The Box Office is open for ticket sales Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

An Unlikely but Highly Satisfying Coupling

Last night Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to Davies Symphony Hall in his capacity as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony to present his next series of programs. His program may have struck many as an unlikely pairing of composers that, given a time machine, would not have had much, if anything, to do with each other. The first half of the program presented the complete score that Igor Stravinsky composed for the ballet “Pulcinella.” The intermission was then followed by Johannes Brahms’ Opus 77 violin concerto in D major.

“Pulcinella” was the first score that Stravinsky composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes following his “Russian trilogy” of “The Firebird,” “Petrushka,” and “The Rite of Spring.” In 1919 Diaghilev recruited choreographer Léonide Massine to create a ballet based on the stock characters of Neapolitan commedia dell'arte and suggested to Stravinsky that he arrange compositions that were, at the time, attributed to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. Stravinsky, of course, could not leave well enough alone and basically overhauled the source material, particularly with outrageous approaches to instrumentation that were even more farcical than commedia tradition. Since some of the sources were songs, he added soprano, tenor, and bass vocalists to his instrumentation.

Having never seen Massine’s choreography, I have no idea how farcical it was; but farce was definitely the order of the day in the music Stravinsky provided. This was most evident in just about every intrusion by the trombonist, but there are no end of loopy eccentricities in the combinations of instruments. These included interplay between a string quartet with added bass and the ripieno string section along with a plethora of imaginative passages for the winds.

Last night the concertino strings were violinists Alexander Barantschik and Dan Carlson, Yun Jie Liu on viola, cellist Rainer Eudeikis, and Scott Pingel on bass. The vocalists were mezzo Sasha Cooke, tenor Nicholas Phan, and bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni. Given that Salonen had recorded the full score with the London Sinfonietta for an album still available from Sony, he was consistently on top of every gesture and nuance. The result last night was exhilarating from start to finish, making it hard for me to contain my delight with the entire experience.

Violinist Julia Fischer (©Uwe Arens, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Just as stimulating was the return of violinist Julia Fischer as soloist for the Brahms concerto. I have never been disappointed by her performances, and she shaped every phrase in each of the three movements with a series of expressive stamps that made certain that this was not same-old-same-old Brahms. Her chemistry with Salonen could not have been better, however unlikely the pairing of the program had been. Audience reception made it clear that I was far from the only one to appreciate her return.

Taken as a whole, last night was a generous share of thoroughly engaging music. Nevertheless, it was clear that the audience would not let Fischer leave without an encore. She opted for the seventeenth of the 24 Caprices for solo violin by Niccolò Paganini. This is the one best known for its rapid-fire runs in the outer sections and the killer octaves in the middle. Fischer glided through the entire caprice without ever breaking a sweat, leaving the stage to allow a very satisfied audience to wend their ways home.

Circadian Quartet Partners with Amy Zanrosso

Last night the Circadian String Quartet (CSQ) returned to Old First Presbyterian Church for the first of two Old First Concerts (O1C) recitals performed with pianist Amy Zanrosso. The members of CSQ are violinists Monika Gruber and David Ryther, violist Omid Assadi, and David Wishnia on cello; and, according to my records, their last O1C appearance took place in November of 2020. The title of last night’s program was Motherland, celebrating two Eastern European nationalist composers.

CSQ and Amy Zanrosso performing David Ryther’s “Firebird” arrangement with the obligatory percussion (screen shot from the video stream of last night’s performance)

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 81 quintet in A major, which, like many of Dvořák’s compositions, was influenced by Czech folk sources. For the first half of the program, Ryther prepared a transcription for piano, strings, and percussion of seven of the episodes from Igor Stravinsky’s score for the two-scene ballet “The Firebird.” The percussion instruments were shared by Ryther and Assadi, with Zanrosso providing a “guest appearance” on triangle. Ryther also introduced both selections with brief commentary.

Both of these offerings were given consistently engaging accounts. Zanrosso performed with just the right chemistry to fit in with CSQ’s approaches to interpretation. The Dvořák quintet is very much a “war horse” in the chamber music repertoire. However familiar the music may have been, however, the players presented the score with all the freshness of spontaneity. The second movement draws upon one of the composer’s favorite genres, the melancholy dumka; and CSQ engagingly captured the full scope of its lyrical qualities.

The Stravinsky arrangement was an ambitious undertaking. Nevertheless, Ryther knew how to focus on selections that had originally been composed primarily for the string section. Thus, more often than not, this “chamber” account managed to provide the same spirit of expressiveness that one identified with the orchestral version. Furthermore, in this chamber setting, one could better appreciate the contrapuntal interplay of the individual lines in the score. As a result, Stravinsky’s music was presented in a new metaphorical light; and, every now and then, that light revealed subtleties that might have been missed in the orchestral version.

CSQ consistently continues to provide engaging perspectives on the chamber music repertoire, and they will return to Old First this afternoon to complete their current visit with works by Robert Schumann and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Let Stravinsky Be Stravinsky!

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, presented the first of (only) two performances of the program it prepared for this month’s California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. While that adjective “new” definitely pervaded much (but not all) of the program, much of that novelty arose in unexpected ways. Only one of the selections involved music being performed for the very first time by SFS.

That selection was “Breathing Forests,” composed by Gabriella Smith in 2021. James M. Keller’s note about this composition for the program book began with the following sentence: “A Bay Area native, Gabriella Smith has emerged as her generation’s most prominent environmentalist composer.” Smith is no stranger to Davies. This past March Salonen conducted her “Tumblebird Contrails,” which the SFS Youth Orchestra had performed in March of 2022. Her credentials are solid, with a composition degree from the Curtis Institute of Music followed by advanced composition study at Princeton University. However, her interest in environmentalism is far from superficial, including five years spent in a songbird research project at Point Reyes.

“Breathing Forests” is a three-movement organ concerto performed last night with James McVinnie (who gave the premiere performance with Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic) as organist. The score consists of three movements played without interruption: “Grow,” “Breathe,” and “Burn.” The pipes for the lowest pitches of the organ induced perception that was visceral as well as auditory. However, in spite of the program note by James M. Keller describing the piece as  “traditional fast-slow-fast concerto form,” there was a disquieting uniformity across the movements with little attention to tempo or, for that matter, the movement titles. More absorbing was the way in which the organ provided a foundation for the thematic content of the other instruments. Nevertheless, the overall sense of sameness across the three movements tended to dull the acuity of listener perception.

Acuity was far sharper in the two compositions by Igor Stravinsky that flanked “Breathing Forests.” The program began with the octet scored for flute, clarinet, two bassoons, two trumpets, trombone, and bass trombone. There was sufficient complexity in the music that Salonen definitely played a key role as conductor. Nevertheless, I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed that the eight instrumentalists were not identified by name in the program book. While one could appreciate the interpretation that Salonen brought to the performance, every “voice” in the score has its own “personality;” and there is no reason why that “personality” should be dissociated from the “person” responsible for the performance!

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Steven Stucky’s 2005 orchestration of Stravinsky’s “Les noces” (the wedding). The original scoring included a full four-part chorus, vocal soloists in the ranges of soprano (Lauren Snouffer), mezzo (Kayleigh Decker), tenor (Paul Appleby), and bass (David Soar). Instrumentation consisted of four pianos, each of which was associated with a set of percussion instruments.

It would be fair to describe the structure of the score as “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” To the extent that there is a narrative, it involves introducing both the bride and the bridegroom, followed by the departure to the wedding service. The service itself is elided from the narrative, and the remainder of the structure is devoted to depicting the wedding feast.

What makes the overall structure fascinating is the way in which all of voices have no end of things to say, yet there are only a few moments when one character is talking to another willing to listen. As a result, there is almost never a libretto included in the program, since a printed text would not be able to capture the many simultaneous utterances. For that matter, Stravinsky’s phrasings of the vocal lines are often so bizarre that one can rarely make sense of the text, even when it is sung in English.

The good news is that Salonen delivered solid leadership with keen attention to both the vocal soloists and the SFS Chorus prepared by its Direction Jenny Wong. The bad news is that the orchestration that Stucky composed to replace the four pianos was pretty much inaudible between the percussionists, the full choral resources, and the intense deliveries by the vocal soloists. The fact is that Stravinsky himself knew how to approach the piano as a percussion instrument. When the music for the four pianos was replaced by orchestral instruments, those percussive qualities were lost; and, to be perfectly frank, I have to confess that I was only barely aware of what the strings, winds, and (even) brass were doing while the percussionists were going to town.

The “poster” for the SFS Web page for the performance being discussed

Mind you, focusing on the music was no easy matter. Animator Hillary Leben prepared a film that served as a down-and-dirty fight for attention between the visual and the auditory. As the above image shows, the “celebrants” for this wedding amounted to a bevy of insect-like creatures displaying all the revelry of Stravinsky’s wedding guests but situated in a sewer system. Leben clearly had her own ideas about narrative; and, with only a few exceptions, they rarely aligned with the words being sung, which (as already observed) deserve more attention than one usually expects of a vocal performance.

Personally, I feel that Stravinsky deliberately overloaded the narrative content of “Les noces;” and Leben’s contribution to the performance reminded me of the old joke about adding another window to the Taj Mahal.

BARS Announces Program for California Festival

This past Sunday the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (BARS) announced that it would be part of this month’s California Festival: A Celebration of New Music. More specifically, the orchestra will be the only LGBTQ organization participating in the Festival. The concert will be dedicated to the memory of the late Michael Morgan, the former Music Director of the Oakland Symphony, who had conducted BARS on three occasions.

Dawn Harms, Music Director of BARS

Before his death, Morgan had commissioned David Conte, Chair of the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, to write a cello concerto to be performed by soloist Emil Miland. That concerto will be given its first performance as part of the coming BARS program. Following usual practices, the program will begin with an overture, the “Mountain Festival Overture,” composed by Seth Grosshandler.

On the other hand, the second half of the program will not present the usual symphony offering. Instead, it will consist of suites from two major ballets choreographed during the first half of the twentieth century. The first of these will be based on Aaron Copland’s music for “Billy the Kid;” and it will be followed by one of the three suites that Igor Stravinsky extracted from his score for “The Firebird.” As usual, the orchestra will be conducted by Music Director Dawn Harms.

The performance will take place in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, which is in the 50 Oak Street building of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 18. All tickets are being sold for between $10 and $40. They may be purchased online through a Tix event page, which includes a “map” showing which seats are currently available.

Klemperer Conducts Klemperer (and others)!

My final article about the Warner Classics Remastered Edition of recordings of the conductor Otto Klemperer will account for twentieth-century works by composers other than Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Ironically, the composer that receives the most attention is Klemperer himself! This did not come as a particularly big surprise to me, since I remember that, during my student days, classical music stations took a liking to his “Merry Waltz.”

However, two of the three “bonus” CDs are devoted entirely to his compositions, most of which are multimovement works. These include a second recording of his second symphony (the first having been on a CD that did not have “bonus” status), along with recordings of his third and fourth symphonies. In addition, there are recordings of the “Philharmonia String Quartet” (presumably members of the New Philharmonia Orchestra) playing Klemperer’s third and seventh quartets. That makes for a fair amount of Klemperer. I must confess that I am still getting my head around these recordings; and I am not surprised that I never encountered any of them on the radio, let alone in a concert hall!

On the other hand, I was glad to have my memory of “Merry Waltz” revived. It took a bit of chutzpah to assign it to the final track of a CD that began with three of the best-known compositions by Johann Strauss. However, these selections were separated by Kurt Weill’s Kleine Dreigroschenmusik, the instrumental suite of music from The Threepenny Opera. Apparently, Klemperer got along very well with Weill and his wife Lotte Lenya. I remember reading an article by Lenya about the two of them encountering Klemperer in a hotel lobby, asking (at the top of his voice) “Is here no telephone?” (a quotation from the libretto for Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which involved one of two texts written to be sung in English).

Only one other twentieth-century composer receives more than a single CD. Like Weill, Igor Stravinsky found his way to the United States; but they ended up on opposite sides of the continent. While Weill continued his career in New York, both Klemperer and Stravinsky escaped from the Nazis and World War II by going to Los Angeles. Klemperer’s Stravinsky recordings consist of the complete 1947 score for the ballet “Petrushka,” the suite extracted from the ballet “Pulcinella,” and the “Symphony in Three Movements.” (This was Stravinsky’s last symphony, and he provided the title.)`

The only other composer in this collection is Paul Hindemith, who also had to flee from the Nazis. (His wife was part-Jewish.) He is accounted for through “Nobilissima Visione,” a three-movement suite extracted from his score for the ballet “Saint Francis.” The CD also includes a previously unreleased recording of the first movement of the 1949 horn concerto with the solo taken by Dennis Brain.

This amounts to a rather modest account of the twentieth-century repertoire, but one can still appreciate the effort that Klemperer summoned to make sure that each of selections is worthy of attention.

The Mathematician’s Ballet

After having kept the book on a shelf for far too long, over the last several months I have been working my way through Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans. This effort was probably motivated by the recent appearance of Homans’ second book, which is devoted entirely to George Balanchine. It would be fair to cite Balanchine as the  pioneering force in the development of American ballet, distinguishing it clearly from much of European ballet tradition. For the most part, Apollo’s Angels has made for a consistently enjoyable reading experience; but things became interesting for me when the timeline arrived at Balanchine’s achievements. Reading Homans evoked distant memories of the period when I took out my first subscription to New York City Ballet (NYCB) performances in Lincoln Center.

At that time I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in mathematics and taking as many electives as I could manage in music courses. As I have previously observed on this site, my spare time (such as its was) was spent working at the campus radio station, devoting much of my time to programming twentieth-century music. As might be guessed, the mathematician in me was particularly drawn to techniques pursued by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern that involved permutations of pitch classes, leading eventually to what became known as the twelve-tone technique.

In that context I became totally hooked on Igor Stravinsky’s “Agon,” which he composed for a Balanchine ballet with the same title. For the better part of his life, Stravinsky wanted nothing to do with Schoenberg. However, after Schoenberg’s death, Stravinsky took an interest in atonal technique, possibly as a result of the influences of Robert Craft.

“Agon” fascinated me for the ways in which atonality rubbed shoulders with tonal traditions, traditions that, in this case, reflected back to the seventeenth century of René Descartes, Étienne Pascal, and particularly Marin Mersenne, whose Harmonie universelle treatise was published in 1636. It was the bold rhetoric of “Agon” than convinced me that I had to see how Balanchine had created a ballet for it. So it was that I began following Balanchine’s choreography both at Lincoln Center and in works that were performed by the Boston Ballet.

Thus, after about 500 pages of reading, I found myself scribbling no end of marginal notes when Homans wrote about “Agon.” She cited the ballet as the third part of a “Greek trilogy” of Balanchine working with Stravinsky’s music. The first two ballets, “Apollo” and “Orpheus,” were grounded in familiar narratives. In sharp contrast, “Agon” was inspired by a seventeenth-century treatise on the dance. What was important, however, was that such dances were intended for “recreational activities” taking place in the setting of a royal court; they were not created to present narratives.

In that context “Agon” had less to do with ancient myths and drew, instead, upon Balanchine’s abstract approach to Paul Hindemith’s composition for piano and strings involving a theme with four variations, given the subtitle “The Four Temperaments.” Balanchine’s choreography realized each of the dispositions associated with those variations (melancholy, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric). However, there was also an underlying “vocabulary” for the entire ballet; and all of the elements of that vocabulary were assembled into the choreographic interpretation of Hindemith’s coda. As a result, it was no surprise to me to observe that the choreography for “Agon” also wraps up with a coda that reflects on the opening measures of Stravinsky’s score.

All this should reflect back on the thoughts about “Agon” that I documented back in June of 2020 when, due to pandemic conditions, I had turned to YouTube when I was unable to attend “physical” performances. At that time I had discovered that John Clifford had uploaded digitizations of films of NYCB performances. The “Agon” film had no end of technical shortcomings; but I made it a point to cite “the rich interplay of abstraction and expressiveness.”

Because of the close partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky, one could appreciate the many intricacies of abstraction based on how Balanchine chose to interpret Stravinsky’s music. At the same time there is an underlying foundation of expressiveness coming from all of the dancers, reflecting not so much on Stravinsky’s music as on a rich understanding of what it means to bring Balanchine’s choreography to life through the act of performance. From my own point of view, I feel that mathematics provided me with a platform on which I could grasp the elements of of abstraction; and those elements, in turn, provided a second platform from which I could view the “parallel” elements of expressiveness.

This may well be the only setting in which mathematics can serve as a prerequisite for appreciating a ballet!

SFS Youth Orchestra Grand Finale Performance

This afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) concluded its 40th anniversary season, led by Wattis Foundation Music Director Daniel Stewart. At least some readers may recall that this season has involved a fair amount of disappointment, but nothing about this final perfomance of the season was disappointing. To the contrary, the account of Igor Stravinsky’s music for the ballet “The Rite of Spring” (Le Sacre du printemps), which concluded the program, could not have been a more engaging listening experience from beginning to end. Once could say the same of the selection that preceded the intermission, George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” The opening selection was the Overture movement of the Spring Festival Suite, composed in 1956 by Li Huanzhi; and it was engaging even for those (like myself) that were totally unfamiliar with Li’s compositions.

Stravinsky’s score probably called for the largest ensemble of the entire SFSYO season. All of the winds are required to command a wide spread of registers, and many of the players have to alternate instruments. The brass section requires less doubling but more than enough instruments to hold their own against not only the winds but also a seriously massive percussion section. Indeed, because the score calls for five timpani, two players are required. Furthermore, even if the setting for the music is “pagan Russia,” one of the percussionists is required to play a Latin American güiro.

The score for this music was not the first score I had ever purchased, but it was an early addition to my library. I was first hooked on the music through Fantasia, and I have to confess that it then took me several years before I purchased a record that would allow me to listen to the music they way Stravinsky had written it. My copy is still legible; but I have to negotiate any number of notes I had written on the score pages, reflecting the many times that I consulted this score when preparing a term paper or writing a review of a performance.

By now I have pretty much internalized the music itself, meaning that I could approach this afternoon as an attentive listener without burying my head in the score pages. My attention was definitely rewarded. By following the musicians rather than the notes, I came to appreciate the ways in which Stravinsky expressed his account of the ballet itself through his own control of the physical space of the musicians.

Just how he managed the “physical space” of the orchestra pit at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris continues to leave me perplexed (particularly after I was able to see a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s La Perichole in that venue, allowing me to inspect the pit myself). Much more important was the way in which Stewart put every square inch of the Davies space to good use. Indeed, the spatial qualities of the “auditory signal” were just as compelling in his performance of “An American in Paris” as they were for “The Rite.”

The instrumentation for Li’s overture were somewhat more modest. Nevertheless, there was still a generous amount of diversity; and Stewart deployed his players on the stage to provide the best account of Li’s sonorities, which reflect both Chinese and Western influences. Listening to his overture left me curious about how he approached the other three movements of his suite.

I have to confess that I was a bit amused that Stewart should summon the final measure in Stravinsky’s score to conclude his season by “going out with a bang.” More important was the confidence and accuracy summoned by all the SFSYO musicians to keep up with Stewart’s negotiation of the music. Clearly, this concluding selection sealed SFSYO’s 40th anniversary with a more-than-memorable bang.

A Weak Response to Stravinsky’s “Rite”

Cover of the album being discussed

Today Pyroclastic Records released a new album entitled The Rite of Spring – Spectre d’un songe. The full title is an enumeration of the two-piano compositions performed by Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe. The first part of the title is the name of a ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for the 1913 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company, setting an original score by Igor Stravinsky. This music for large orchestra was given a two-piano version prepared by the composer himself.

Courvoisier is best known as a jazz musician and improviser. She decided to provide an arrangement of Stravinsky’s score that would reflect jazz interpretation with both notated and improvised music. Unfortunately, the Stravinsky family would only allow his music to be performed in his two-piano version or in a version for four hands on a single keyboard.

Courvoisier’s response was to create a new work, “Spectre d’un songe,” which would serve as a “response” to Stravinsky’s “call” without explicitly citing that “call.” The title translates as “spirit of a dream;” but, in all probability, it is also a nod to “Le Spectre de la rose” (the spirit of the rose). This was the title of a ballet created by Michel Fokine in which Nijinsky danced the title role. However, it is worth noting that the music for “Le Spectre de la rose” (piano music by Carl Maria von Weber orchestrated by Hector Berlioz) is as far removed from “Spectre d’un songe” as the Stravinsky score is.

Thus “Spectre d’un songe” is very much a unique composition. The problem is that the music is not particularly compelling. One reason may be that Courvoisier never really created a thematic repertoire that would stand on its own merits without any explicit nods to Stravinsky. To be fair, such an undertaking is clearly a tall order; and, at the very least, Courvoisier deserves points for trying. However, when one listens to her music in the wake of Stravinsky’s score (the first two tracks on the album), it is clear that she could never set her own bar high enough.

Personally, I am more than happy with how Courvoisier and Smyth play the first two tracks of the album. I have been giving both piano versions of the ballet score considerable time, going all the way back to October of 2009, when I heard the ZOFO duo play the single-keyboard version. The Courvoisier-Smyth version is right up there with other four-hand and two-piano performances I have encountered for over a decade. However, if Courvoisier wishes to exercise her own chops as a composer, I suggest that she do so in a way that will avoid even a remote association with Stravinsky!

A New Profil Anthology of Violinist Ivry Gitlis

courtesy of Naxos of America

According to my records, the last time I wrote about a Profil anthology was in October of 2022, when I discussed the six-CD collection entitled The Young Friedrich Gulda. Those that have been following up on my work for some time probably know that I never pass up an opportunity to write about that pianist and his strikingly diverse repertoire. This Friday Profil will release its latest collection; and, once again, repertoire was the reason for drawing my attention. Ivry Gitlis: The Legend is a four-CD collection of recordings by a violinist with a command of the standard repertoire that preferred to focus his attention on works composed in the twentieth century. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-orders for those wishing to be “first in line” to appreciate this violinist’s legacy.

This is one of those anthologies that has autobiographical significance. As a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, most of my extracurricular time was spend in the studios of the campus radio station (whose call letters then were WTBS), where I initiated a weekly program of music of the twentieth century. While the station had a moderately good library, I found that I could also draw upon the recordings in the Library building, which included an entire area for a Music Library (which happened to be almost adjacent to the building housing WTBS). It was through that Music Library that I first encountered Alban Berg’s violin concerto. There was only one recording, and the violinist on that recording was Ivry Gitlis.

A few years later I found myself dividing most of my spare time between WTBS and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, run by Marvin Minsky. Minsky had invited mathematician Seymour Papert to join his staff; and Papert, in turn, invited Gilbert Voyat, who had earned his doctorate at the University of Geneva and was working there as a research associate and instructor at the International Center for Genetic Epistemology. Because Voyat and I frequently talked about music, the Berg violin concerto showed up in our conversations sooner rather than later. When I mentioned that I knew of only one recording, I learned that Gitlis was one of Voyat’s friends!

In spite of my new “knowledge source,” I learned almost nothing about the scope of Gitlis’ repertoire. As a result, over half a century elapsed before I knew anything more about Gitlis or could listen to recordings to account for the rest of that repertoire. The scope of that repertoire in the Profil anthology is best approached by first identifying the selections that predate the twentieth century.

The most familiar of the “usual suspects” are included: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 violin concerto in D major and Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 in E minor. There are also two short “encore” pieces by Henryk Wieniawski and the version of Ernest Chausson’s Opus 25 “Poème” for violin and piano. Finally, there is Giuseppe Tartini’s G minor violin sonata best known as the “Devil’s Trill Sonata.” However, the version that Gitlis recorded was an arrangement by Fritz Kreisler (which probably “liberated” the accompanist from dealing with figured bass) that included a cadenza of Kreisler’s own invention.

Where the twentieth century is concerned, there was a generous assortment of conductors that worked with Gitlis. The conductor for the Berg concerto was William Strickland, an American whose primary focus was on American composers. The European conductors, on the other hand, included Hans Rosbaud, Heinrich Hollreiser, Hans Swarowsky, and (of particular interest to me) Jascha Horenstein. (Some readers may recall that I discussed Horenstein’s Profil collection in June of 2020. That article referenced an additional recording of a twenty-minute conversation with Horenstein conducted by Alan Blyth.)

In the context of the entire Gitlis collection, however, the Berg concerto continues to register the lion’s share of my attention. Mind you, where “historical authority” is concerned, there will probably never be a substitute for the recording that Louis Krasner made on May 1, 1936 with Anton Webern conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. However, while Krasner clearly honored the spirit of Berg, I have been impressed over the years with the number of violinists I have encountered that have found their own approach to giving the concerto an expressive interpretation. Nevertheless, given how few of those recordings were available during the third quarter of the twentieth century, the significance of Gitlis’ recording cannot be denied.

Having listened to the entire Profil collection, I would say that such significance also applies to composers such as Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and Jean Sibelius; this new collection is definitely “one for the books.”