Violinist Vilde Frang (photograph by Marco Borggreve, courtesy of SFS)
When Polish conductor Krzysztof Urbański made his debut conducting the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in October of 2017, my headline describe his program as one of “Spirited Freshness.” Yesterday afternoon he returned to Davies Symphony Hall. His conducting style was as spirited as it had been at his debut; and, once again, he brought stimulating freshness to the three decidedly different compositions on the program. In addition, as had been the case in 2017, his soloist was a violinist, this time the Norwegian Vilde Frang performing Edward Elgar’s Opus 61 concerto in B minor. This time is was Frang’s turn to be the debuting artist.
Elgar’s violin concerto tends to get less attention than his Opus 85 cello concerto in E minor, which he did not begin until almost a decade had elapsed since the completion of Opus 61. The violin concerto was written in response to a request from the violinist Fritz Kreisler. That request was made in 1907; but Kreisler had built his reputation on nineteenth-century aesthetics, which he sustained throughout all the changes that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. If Kreisler was expecting a concerto that would pick up where Brahms left off, he got quite a surprise. Nevertheless, he probably still appreciated the vast extent of virtuoso demands that Elgar’s concerto provided and no doubt took great pleasure is rising to every one of the score’s challenges. At the same time, Kreisler probably enjoyed Elgar’s (prankish?) insertion of a motif from the first movement of Brahms’ concerto as a key element the third movement of his own concerto.
Yesterday afternoon Frang rose to all of Elgar’s challenges as deftly as Kreisler probably had done. However, her technical fireworks were perfectly balanced against the many moments of rich lyricism that decidedly differentiate Opus 61 from anything written by Brahms (or any other nineteenth-century composer). In was in those lyrical passages that one could best appreciate just how powerful the chemistry was between soloist and conductor. Both were attentive to even the slightest detail in equal measure. By virtue of their joining forces, the attentive listener could enjoy not only the extent of Elgar’s expressiveness but also its many subtleties, most of which tend to get lost in the process of editing source material for release as a recording. Frang had a solid command of the almost-inaudible pianissimo; and Urbański always knew how to keep his ensemble in check to make sure that every listener could appreciate that command.
His capacity for freshness also surfaced in the second half of the program, devoted entirely to Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 90 (“Italian”) symphony in A major. Readers may recall the delight I took in Christian Reif’s interpretation of Mendelssohn’s Opus 26 (“Hebrides”) concert overture with the SFS Youth Orchestra, highlighted by “the interleaving of ornate lines for the different string players, textures that are more readily associated with this composer’s chamber music.” The string textures of Opus 90 are just as rich and probably even more varied in both structure and the impressions registered by those structures. Mind you, there is no shortage of judicious work for both the winds and the brass; so the overall listening experience is one of constantly shifting foreground-background relationships. This was anything but a routine account of a familiar Mendelssohn symphony.
The program began with the SFS premiere performance of an overture by the Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, whose title is only “Overture.” This piece required the largest number of performers for the program, including generous contributions for winds, brass, and percussion. Curiously, the rhetorical stance of the music was enigmatically upbeat. I say “enigmatically” because the overture was composed in 1943, a time when Poland was little more than a Nazi conquest and Bacewicz was living in a displaced-persons’ camp in Lublin. My personal conjecture was that the composer was determined to put on the face of optimism, no matter how pessimistic things had become. Urbański conducted as if he had a clear sense of not only the optimism but also the motivation behind it; and, as a result, he got the program off to a rousing start that could not fail to attract and hold the attention of anyone willing to listen.
His return to Davies was as high a point of this season as his debut had been last season.
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