Friday, December 3, 2021

Another Stunning visit from Simone Young

Conductor Simone Young (photograph by Sandrah Steh, courtesy of SFS)

Ever since Australian conductor Simone Young made her debut with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in April of 2019, it has been clear that she has a comfort zone in music for large ensembles. This was particularly evident in November of 2019, when she filled in for Antonio Pappano, who had been scheduled to conduct a concert performance of the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. Even in the absence of any staging, her command of the score and her engagement with both the vocalists and the full SFS ensemble kept every attentive listener in Davies Symphony Hall on the edge of his/her/their seat.

Last night Young returned to Davies to lead the first of the three performances in this week’s SFS subscription offering. This was an overture-concerto-symphony program that did not need an overture, since both the concerto and the symphony were extended-duration offerings, both requiring large ensembles. For the first half of the program, violinist Christian Tetzlaff performed Edward Elgar’s Opus 61 violin concerto in B minor. The intermission was then followed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 64 (fifth) symphony in E minor.

The Elgar concerto tends to receive much less attention than his Opus 85 cello concerto in E minor, music that was all but forgotten prior to the release of a recording by Jacqueline du Pré in the Sixties, suggesting that sometimes it takes half a century to become an overnight success. However, where Opus 85 tends to be elegiac, Opus 61 is almost ferociously passionate. Fortunately, Tetzlaff is the sort of violinist capable of commanding the full gamut of expressiveness in his performances, all of which are built on a foundation of solid technical skills.

However, like Ludwig van Beethoven’s violin concerto in D major (also an Opus 61), the concerto has a richly extensive opening section performed by the orchestra prior to the first measures for the soloist. In Elgar’s case that opening section draws upon the full resources of a moderately large string section along with a full complement of wind and brass instruments. (The score lists both contrabassoon and tuba as options, and both of them were included the SFS performance.)

As a result, the wide scope of instrumental sonorities and dispositions unfolds before the violinist strikes the first solo note. That entry then leads to a vast unfolding of intense finger-busting challenges for the soloist, each one given just the right expressive interpretation by Tetzlaff. Thus, each of the concerto’s three movements established its edge-of-the-seat rhetorical development, making for a finale that left one intensely stimulated, if not also a little dazed.

After such a deeply-involved commitment to the concerto, it came as no surprise that Tetzlaff did not take an encore; we all had to regroup our dispositional responses before experiencing any more music!

There was also some degree of ferocity when Young returned to the podium to conduct Tchaikovsky’s Opus 64. Like both the Opus 36 (fourth) symphony in F minor the the Opus 74 (sixth) symphony in B minor, Opus 74 has thematic material that cuts across all four of the movements. In Opus 64 that material begins as a mournful solo for clarinet, and the chemistry between Young and Principal Clarinet Carey Bell was clear from the outset. By the time the fourth movement has begun its coda, that mournful solo has transmogrified into an all-hands-on-deck triumphal march. Between those “bookends” Young brought clarity to the unique disposition of every thematic episode, providing a journey as rich in diversity of expressiveness as the audience had encountered in the Elgar concerto.

The entire program was definitely “one for the books;” and readers would do well to consider that there are two more opportunities to experience this rich conjunction of orchestra, soloist, and (above all) conductor.

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