Salonen at Davies: A Taste of What’s to Come?

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the San Francisco Symphony for the first time since his appointment as Music Director Designate (photograph by Brandon Patoc, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, San Franciscans had their first opportunity to experience Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) since his appointment as successor to Michael Tilson Thomas as Music Director was announced at the beginning of last month. His appearance was somewhat fortuitous, filling in a slot of subscription concerts that had been vacated when Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla postponed her SFS debut due to maternity/family leave following the birth of her first child. As might be expected, Salonen changed the program that Gražinytė-Tyla had planned in favor of three instrumental selections reflecting his own personal interests.

During his last visit to Davies, in December of 2011, the core of his program was his own violin concerto, which he had completed in 2009 and composed for Leila Josefowicz, who again served as soloist for the first SFS performances of the piece. This time he presented a West Coast premiere performance of “METACOSMOS,” completed by Icelandic composer Anna S. Þorvaldsdóttir (Thorvaldsdottir) in 2017. The full extent of Salonen’s 2011 program explored the diversity of sonorous resources that SFS could provide; and “METACOSMOS” served to begin last night’s program with a similar objective.

The composition was written on a commission awarded by the New York Philharmonic in 2015 as part of her selection as Kravis Emerging Composer, and Salonen conducted the piece’s world premiere in April of last year. Structurally, one might approach the composition in terms of a dialectical relationship between consonance and dissonance, whose synthesis may well be taken as the core of music-making in just about any culture during any period of past or present activities. Thorvaldsdottir tends to approach dissonance as a byproduct of thickly rich polyphonic textures, suggesting that a composer like György Ligeti had been one of her influences. Her Wikipedia page says little about her studies and nothing about her influences; but I suspect that many who revel in the diverse variety of approaches to modernism during the second half of the twentieth century may have felt that they had already experienced much of the “METACOSMOS” rodeo.

To put my own cards on the table, some readers may recall that I have had a modest share of experiences in listening to Thorvaldsdottir’s music through recordings. On the whole my reactions have run the gamut from lukewarm to disappointed. However, given her diverse interests in not only thick textures but also approaching the threshold of absolute silence, I felt that her work deserved to be experienced in performance, rather than through recordings. Last night I could appreciate the attentiveness to detail in her work, but I still came away with the feeling that she had not yet found a way to allow her own voice to emerge from all that history that preceded her efforts.

“METACOSMOS” was followed by a far more familiar selection, Richard Strauss’ Opus 30 tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra” (thus spoke Zarathustra). This music has its own “cosmic” connotations, even if they owe more to Stanley Kubrick than to Friedrich Nietzsche. This selection allowed one to experience Salonen’s prodigious skills in balancing the resources of a very large ensemble (including managing several gut-rumbling organ pedal tones as part of the mix).

There is a tendency, due heavily to the influence of Stefan Zweig, to approach the Nietzsche text that inspired Strauss as one of dead seriousness. However, Walter Kaufmann’s preface to that text refers to its “modern blend of the sublime and the ridiculous” and observes:

The fusion of seriousness and satire, pathos and pun, is as characteristic of the message as it is of the style of the book.

There is at least one suggestion that Strauss was aware of the book’s “overflowing sense of humor, which prefers even a poor joke to no joke at all” (Kaufmann again). Composed between 1895 and 1896, “Also sprach Zarathustra” was composed immediately after “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.” Strauss, of course, was never bothered about borrowing his own music; and the attentive listener will find Till lurking in a few of the “Zarathustra” passages. Salonen seemed to appreciate that Nietzsche’s capacity for wit mattered as much to Strauss as did the wildly diverse images evoked by the episodes that unfold as the book progresses. As a result he showed himself to be one of those conductors that manages to keep the more tedious elements of Strauss’ narratives in check.

Following the intermission, Salonen turned to Jean Sibelius, as he had done on his last visit to Davies. This time he presented the Opus 22, known both as the Lemminkäinen Suite and Four Legends from the Kalevala. This suite is best known for its fourth movement, “The Swan of Tuonela;” but each of the four movements corresponds to a single runo (canto) from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Sibelius could expect his Finnish audiences to see the connections between those runos and the music he had composed. Just about any other audience lacks that “Finnish background;” and text summaries of the runos do not provide very much assistance.

The result was a reading of the score that often lacked the forward drive associated with the reading of an epic. The first two movements almost felt as if they were iterating their thematic material more than necessary. “The Swan of Tuonela” rose above those movements with its own impeccable rhetoric of stillness and Ross deLuna’s ravishing cor anglais work. The final movement, “Lemminkäinen’s Return,” finally picked up the energy level and was the most effective of the four in its connotations of dramatic tension.

Overall, this was an evening of mixed results. However, it was also the work of a conductor clearly not afraid to venture into unfamiliar territory and take on the challenge of giving that territory a compelling account to his audience. If the specific results were on the inconsistent side, the promise of adventurous approaches to program preparation was far more significant.