Salonen’s Richly Disciplined Account of Sibelius

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen presented the first of the two programs he has prepared for the Summer Season of the San Francisco Symphony. This was a basic overture-concerto-symphony program compressed into a 90-minute evening without intermission. The symphony, Jean Sibelius’ Opus 43 (second) in D major, composed in 1902, was decidedly the main attraction. More than a century old, this composition has endured as Sibelius’ best-known and most accessible symphony.

Nevertheless, Salonen brought a freshness to his interpretation resulting in anything but a here-we-go-again account. He clearly grasped every detail of the score with a full appreciation of the composer’s rich palette of sonorities and the often eyebrow-raising contrasts of an individual instrument offsetting the lush texture of a particular section of the orchestra. Most important was his attentiveness to changes in dynamic levels, not just the shock of contrast but also the gradual accumulation of the dynamic level against an ostinato pattern. The overall result was one of a first-time experience, no matter how many times the listener has encountered this music in a concert hall or on recording.

Just as fresh was the concerto offering, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 622 clarinet concerto in A major, with Principal Clarinet Cary Bell as soloists. I first confronted this music when I was in junior high school. I can not even guess how many times I worked my way through the clarinet part. Ironically, last night was my first opportunity to listen to this music in performance, rather than on recordings.

As is the case with his many piano concertos, Mozart’s rhetoric emerges not only through the solo work but also through his judicious approach to the wind resources. In K. 622 those resources are two flutes, two bassoons, and two horns. The absence of oboes is particularly interesting, suggesting that Mozart had given considerable thought to those timbres that would blend best with the clarinet (which, itself, has a different timbre for each of its registers). Salonen seemed well aware of these resource choices, making the relationships established between clarinet and orchestral winds as distinctively imaginative as the unique choices Mozart made for each of his piano concertos.

Bell’s account could not have been more polished. His management of those different registers often evoked the sense that he was playing polyphony. (Presumably, that is what Mozart intended in what he composed, making the most of all those diverse sonorities.) With the marks on paper still deeply etched in my memory, I could tell when Bell was improvising his own embellishments; and his rhetoric was consistently engaging. Unless I am mistaken, the score provides only one cadenza opportunity; but it was clear that Bell was just as comfortable playing with those marks on paper as he was with interpreting them faithfully.

1723 copy of Stölzel’s “Bist du bei mir” aria from his Diomedes opera (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The “overture” was a brief (less than five minutes) setting of an aria from the opera Diomedes, whose full score has been lost. Johann Sebastian Bach copied the melody and bass lines of this aria into the second notebook he compiled for his second wife, Anna Magdalena. When the original Bach-Gesellschaft publication was first compiled, this piece was taken to be Bach’s own composition; and Wolfgang Schmieder numbered it BWV 508 in his catalog. However, the composer was actually Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (whose last name appears with a question mark in the second, “new,” complete works edition). The original Stölzel manuscript was only discovered in 2000, long after the twentieth-century conductor Otto Klemperer prepared an orchestral arrangement of this music, which opened last night’s concert. Klemperer filled in the voices between the two Bach had notated for his wife, scoring the piece for string ensemble. Salonen’s attention to the intimate song-like qualities of this music provided just the right “curtain-raiser” for the concerto and symphony to follow.