The “official title” of this week’s program, presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall and conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, is Exotic Birds: Debussy, Messiaen & Saariaho. What may be more interesting is that the selections by these three composers spanned a period of slightly more than 100 years. The entire program was framed by two of the best-known orchestral compositions by Claude Debussy, beginning with the “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune” and concluding with “La mer.” The first half of the program continued with Olivier Messiaen’s “Oiseaux exotiques” (exotic birds) serving as the “mid-point” for the program’s century of music. For this performance the SFS ensemble was joined by pianist Jeremy Denk. The intermission was then followed by Kaija Saariaho’s concerto for flute and orchestra, given the title “Aile du songe” (wing of the dream), completed in 2001 with Claire Chase (one of Salonen’s Collaborative Partners) as soloist. While Saariaho was born in Helsinki and studied at the Sibelius Academy, her base of operations is now in Paris, the city that provided the same home for both Debussy and Messiaen.
The program note by James M. Keller for “Aile du songe” suggests that it might be more appropriate to call the composition “concerto-like,” rather than simply classifying it as a concerto. Certainly, the overall structure does not follow concerto conventions. The twenty-minute composition is divided into two sections reflecting settings first in the air and then on land. The first section begins with a “Prélude” followed by two episodes, “Garden of the Birds” and “Other Shores.” The second section begins with “Dancing Bird,” after which it concludes with “Bird, a Tiny Satellite of Our Planetary Orbit,” appropriating a phrase by the poet Saint-John Perse. Those viewing the SoundBox programs streamed by SFSymphony+ may recall that Chase performed the second section of this concerto as part of the Metamorphoses program that she curated at the beginning of this past July.
The instrumentation for “Aile du songe” was particularly imaginative. Chase shared the front of the stage with one of the largest percussion ensembles (including timpani) that I have encountered in Davies. The only other instruments were the string section, harp, and celesta. Saariaho has been known for her rich palettes of diverse sonorities, possibly due to her earlier interest in electronic music; but the diversity is so broad that one might easily forget that this is a flute concerto. Mind you, Chase had her own contributions to those sonorities, which included interpolating the flute passages with vocalizations. Ultimately, “Aile du songe” emerged as a performance in which the visual experience was as compelling as that of listening.
“Oiseaux exotiques” was similarly impressive in its approach to instrumentation. The percussionists took their usual place at the rear of the stage, but they were as busy in performing Messiaen as they were in the Saariaho selection. This time, however, there was no string section; and the winds and brass were distributed across the stage with some sense that spatial relations were as significant as the marks on the score pages. Denk’s piano, on the other hand, had the usual front-and-center location.
Messiaen’s interest in birdsong dates back to 1952 when he composed “Le merle noir” (the blackbird) for flute and piano, in which the flute part was based entirely of blackbird songs. This was followed in 1953 by the orchestral composition “Réveil des oiseaux” (awakening birds), which again involves little more than a rich diversity of birdsongs. “Oiseaux exotiques” was composed between 1955 and 1956 and accounts for an array of 47 birdsongs. Mind you, I did not try to count them all; but some of them were clearly more percussive than melodic. As a result, there was considerable diversity in the quarter-hour duration of this composition, although it would probably be fair to say that not all of the birds accounted for are consistently engaging.
Given the rich inventiveness encountered in both “Oiseaux exotiques” and “Aile du songe,” the familiarity of “La mer” made for a welcome conclusion to the evening. Nevertheless, this, too, is music with a rich diversity of subtly-shifting sonorities. The primary distinction was probably that most of the listeners in the hall knew what would come next and when it would come. Still, Salonen brought his own approach to shaping the three movements of Debussy’s composition. Furthermore, the earlier selections on the program sensitized the listener to attend to even the subtlest of details; and those subtle details were just as evident in century-old Debussy as they were in the mid-century of Messiaen and the recent past of Saariaho. For that matter, the decade-earlier “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune” had its own subtle sonorous details unfolding during the modest duration of only ten minutes.
Taken as a whole, the entire experience amounted to an evening in which attentive listening was consistently and abundantly rewarded.
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