Last night the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) returned to Davies Symphony Hall to kick off its 2021–22 season with a “Re-Opening Night” program. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted a program of four composers, all from the North and South American continents. The SFS musicians were joined by Salonen’s Collaborative Partner, vocalist and bassist esperanza spalding, a jazz trio of guest musicians, and members of the Alonzo King LINES Ballet.
This was, for the most part, a high-energy program, climaxing at the conclusion with “Noches de encantamiento,” the theme-and-variations final movement of a four-movement suite that José Yves Limantour extracted from the score that Silvestre Revueltas composed for the film The Night of the Mayas. Most impressive were the four percussion groups that occupied pretty much the entirety of the rear of the stage area.
The program note by James M. Keller observed that “each individual group should be given the opportunity to improvise freely on its basic rhythm whilst the other three accompany these players until it is their turn to improvise.” The unbridled energy of this percussion work tended to distract from both the theme and its four variations. However, it was clear that the rhythms were the core of Revueltas’ score; and the energy behind those rhythms could not have brought the evening to a more stimulating conclusion.
At the other end of the program, things began with a performance of John Adams’ “Slonimsky’s Earbox.” This was also a large-ensemble composition with an extended and diverse percussion section. In the context of my own Adams listening experiences, I would say that this is the most stimulating romp I have encountered since my first contact with “Grand Pianola Music.” However, the brazen in-your-face qualities that made “Grand Pianola Music” such a hoot have been refined by a more attentive approach to the progression of energy levels. While the idea of an “earbox” seems to have been Adams’ own, the title was named after Nicolas Slonimsky, whose encyclopedic knowledge of music history was complemented only by his own repertoire of brazen qualities (such as rolling an orange across a piano keyboard to play one of Frédéric Chopin’s études). In selecting this particular Adams composition, Salonen definitely knew how to get the evening off to a roaring start.
Adams’ energetic intensity was then complemented by the suite extracted from Alberto Ginastera’s Opus 8 score for the ballet Estancia. This was the selection for which Alonzo King created choreography, performed by members of his LINES Ballet company. The Davies stage was extended out into the front rows of the Orchestra seating; and King used this space to create dances for the four movements of the suite, all throbbing with intense energy. The choreographic vocabulary was a bit limited but then so was the area allocated for the dancers.
The one down-side to the evening was the Wayne Shorter composition that followed the Ginastera. “Gaia” was composed in 2013 and was receiving its first SFS performances this week. spalding was the leading soloist on both bass and vocals; and she was joined by a combo of Leo Genovese on piano, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, and Ravi Coltrane on saxophone. Scoring for the SFS musicians was minimal, usually serving to highlight aspects of the jazz performers.
Sadly, the score was based on an extended vocal text that was not delivered particularly coherently by spalding, even with (or perhaps because of) assistance from a microphone. While her bass work was as engaging as ever, the idea of having a text at all was little more than a distraction from Shorter’s inventiveness and the skills of the jazz musicians. This was also the primary reason why a program that was supposed to be limited to an hour’s duration clocked in at around 90 minutes!
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