KQED Presents Salonen’s First Major SFS Project

Last night KQED presented the debut broadcast of Throughline: San Francisco Symphony—From Hall to Home, the closest that the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) has come to a full-length concert since all the public places of the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center were shut down on March 7 to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The video provided the first opportunity to see Esa-Pekka Salonen in his new role as SFS Music Director; but it was far from a run-of-the-mill concert performance. As has been observed several times in the past, one of the first things that Salonen did after learning of his appointment was to name eight Collaborative Partners; and Throughline provided the opportunity to introduce them all to San Francisco audiences.

It is worth reviewing (again) just who these Partners are:

1. pianist, film producer, and composer of award-winning film scores, Nicholas Britell
2. soprano and curator, Julia Bullock, who has made social consciousness and activism fundamental to her work
3. flutist, educator, and advocate for new and experimental music, Claire Chase
4. composer, new music curator, and member of The National, Bryce Dessner
5. violinist, musical director, and artistic trailblazer, Pekka Kuusisto
6. composer and genre-breaking collaborator, Nico Muhly
7. artificial intelligence entrepreneur and roboticist, Carol Reiley
8. jazz bassist and vocalist, esperanza spalding.

All of them contributed to the final work on the program, “Throughline,” composed by Nico Muhly on an SFS commission as an uninterrupted series of thirteen short movements and given its world premiere on last night’s broadcast. Due to the pandemic, the result amounted to a synthesis of filming, recording, editing, and some highly sophisticated post-processing on a global scale.

Pandemic conditions also meant that the Partners themselves were geographically distributed:

1. Britell played piano in Los Angeles.
2. Bullock sang in Munich.
3. Chase played flute in New York.
4. Dessner played guitar in Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle (in France).
5. Kuusisto played violin in Helsinki.
6. spalding contributed bass and vocal work in northern Oregon, composing her respective movement.
7. Muhly conducted in Davies Symphony Hall.

Reiley contributed to the seventh movement of “Throughline,” entitled “Three Fast Lines,” with artificial intelligence software that served as “co-composer.”

The result was probably more a feast for the eyes, rather than the ears. Muhly provided smooth transitions through a diverse variety of sonorities. However, the only movement that really registered was the one spontaneously improvised by spalding, realized through her imaginative bass performance accompanying some truly stunning vocal work. On the other hand the video editing was consistently top-notch throughout the entire composition, particularly when it involved multiple images.

Kev Choice rapping “Movements” with dancer Yeni Lucero and SFS musicians Jerome Simas (bass clarinet), Jessie Fellows (violin), Aaron Schuman (trumpet), and Carey Bell (clarinet) (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Indeed, the viewer was well prepared for the video work thanks to the second piece on the program, “Movements,” created by rapper Kev Choice on an SFS commission and released as part of the CURRENTS series. I should probably confess, by way of disclaimer, that I am no great fan of rap, finding too much of it stentorian and simplistic. However, there was no denying that Choice and his musical backers managed to establish an intriguing blend with ten SFS musicians; and the video editing summoned up some dazzling techniques to establish and celebrate these two decidedly different worlds of music-making.

The remainder of the program provided three more opportunities to appreciate the talents of different groups of SFS performers. Percussionists Jacob Nissly, Bryce Leafman, Stan Muncy, and Artie Storch opened the program with Ellen Reid’s “Fear / Release.” They were captured on video in both outdoor and indoor settings, creating the sense that one was listening to a tightly-knit octet, rather than a quartet. They were followed by “Shaking and Trembling,” the first movement from John Adams’ Shaker Loops with Salonen conducting violinists Helen Kim, Suzanne Leon, and Polina Sedukh, violist Yun Jie Liu, cellists David Goldblatt and Carolyn McIntosh, and Daniel G. Smith on bass. Finally, in the spirit of “something completely different,” Choice’s “Movements” was followed by Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 95 (“Serioso”) string quartet in F minor, played by violinists Chen Zhao and David Chernyavsky, violist David Kim, and cellist Anne Pinsker. Both Adams and Beethoven were given more conventional video coverage, but the camera work did much to orient the ear towards the ways in which different instruments contributed at different times.

The entire video is now available for viewing on a Web page on the SFS Web site. That page also summarizes the entire program and the participating musicians. There is also a window that provides an online program book. However, given the extraordinary video skills behind the performance itself, one would be best off viewing the concert on its own in full-screen mode!