SFS: The Full Ensemble Returns to Davies

Esa-Pekka Salonen on the SFS podium (from the SFS Web page for this week’s concert)

Last night Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall to lead the first of the final two programs in the current reduced season of eight performances during the months of May and June. As regular readers know, the program planned for this week was updated towards the end of last month, when it was announced that SFS would be able to incorporate wind and brass instruments in the performances. This meant that visiting soloist, violinist Augustin Hadelich, could play the Opus 77 violin concerto in D major by Johannes Brahms, rather than the originally scheduled serenade by Leonard Bernstein.

In other words, for the first time since March of 2020, the stage of Davies was filled with SFS playing as a full ensemble, and the Brahms selection could not have been more appropriate. Not only does it have a long-standing reputation as an audience favorite; but also it served as a first-rate platform for Hadelich’s prodigious virtuosity. Furthermore, it offered welcome opportunity to appreciate Salonen’s skills in establishing just the right chemistry between soloist and ensemble. If that were not enough, the solo work was enhanced by Hadelich’s decision to provide his own cadenzas, rather than the cadenza Joseph Joachim prepared for his premiere performance of this concerto in 1878. In other words the performance provided just the right balance between the Brahms tradition and the freshness of immediacy delivered by both Hadelich and Salonen.

That immediacy was further reinforced by Hadelich’s choice of an encore, the “Louisiana Blues Strut: A Cakewalk” by the Afro-American twentieth-century composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Readers may recall that Hadelich included this on the program he prepared for his Atterbury House Sessions recital, which was streamed almost exactly a month ago. All of the prodigious virtuosity that Hadelich had mustered for his Brahms interpretation resurfaced as “something completely different” in Perkinson’s cheeky blues rhetoric, delivered with that same intense technique that made the Brahms so stimulating.

Unless I am mistaken, last night was also the first time I heard Salonen address the audience. He chose to do this to introduce the United States premiere of Daniel Kidane’s “Be Still,” a wise decision since James Keller’s paragraph for the program sheet said much more about the composer than about the music. Most critically, Kidane took his title from “East Coker,” the second of the four long poems that T. S. Eliot collected under the title Four Quartets.

“Be Still” was Kidane’s personal reflection on living under pandemic conditions. As Keller’s note observed, he came particularly occupied with time, a theme that cuts across all four of the Eliot poems. The passage that inspired Kidane’s title is the following:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

That stillness is realized through delicately understated passages for a string ensemble augmented by a set of crotales, which are bowed rather than struck. The piece lasted less than ten minutes, but the atmosphere that Kidane summoned and Salonen realized could not have been a better account of stillness suspending the very passage of time.

The SFS winds made their “comeback debut” at the beginning of the program with a performance of Richard Strauss’ Opus 7 serenade in E-flat major. Strauss was in his late teens when he composed this relatively short (about ten minutes’ duration) piece, which was probably inspired by the fact that his father was a virtuoso horn player. I was particularly struck by the fact that Strauss wrote this piece about three years after Brahms’ Opus 77 concerto was first performed. The association was motivated by the impeccable balance of wind sonorities that begin the Adagio (second) movement of that concerto. As I left Davies last night, I could not help but wonder that, had Strauss paid more attention to that Brahms concerto and less attention to his father, his youthful serenade would have been more sonorous and less rambling.