Conductor Chloé Van Soeterstède on the Web page for last night’s performance
Yesterday evening saw the beginning of the Summer with Symphony series of concerts in Davies Symphony Hall. A few performances by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) are interleaved with a diversity of “pops” repertoire event. Fortunately, things got under way with a Summer Classics SFS performance. Chloé Van Soeterstède made her debut on the Davies podium; and the concerto soloist was violinist Paul Huang, who made his SFS debut in February of 2024. The overall program followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony structure, with the intermission between the concerto and the symphony.
The concerto selection was Max Bruch’s Opus 26 violin concerto in G minor. I am not sure I can account for how many recordings I currently have of the concerto, but I am pretty sure I first came to appreciate it through my “complete works” collection of the recordings Jascha Heifetz made for RCA. My guess is that there are many discophiles that would declare that the Heifetz version is the “gold standard” of recordings of Opus 26. While I appreciate its historical significance, I am always interested in what new soloists bring to the table, so to speak.
Sadly, Huang did not have very much to bring, but, to be fair, neither did Van Soeterstède. Mind you, I have had many enjoyable encounters of performances of Opus 26; and I always appreciate a violinist with enough inventiveness to “go beyond Heifetz.” Last night, on the other hand, was little more than a here-we-go-again account of a warhorse. Mind you, the audience, as a whole, was receptive; but Huang’s performance left me hungry for a more engaging listening experience, which, sadly, was not delivered in the encore selection, whose title he failed to announce.
Following the intermission, my quibbles about Huang transmogrified into quibbles about Felix Mendelssohn. The second half of the program was devoted entirely to his Opus 107 symphony in D major, given the title “Reformation.” The title of this symphony is realized in the final movement, which involves a fantasia on Martin Luther's hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.” However, where musical rhetoric is concerned, the overall succession of four movements is more than a bit of a slog or, as I scribbled in my program book, “desperately in need of ‘reformation!’”
The overture for the program was given its first SFS performance. It was a concert overture written in the key of D major in 1873 by the Swedish composer Elfrida André. This perfectly served its role as a “warm up” for what was to follow, but it turned out to be the most engaging selection on the entire program! This is a composer that deserves a good biography to provide further examination of her musical talents. Of course, that biography would have to account for how she persuaded the Swedish government to hire women as telegraph operators!
