Gandelsman Never Fires on a Single Cylinder

Violinist Johnny Gandelsman (photograph by Shervin Lainez, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

There is much to be said for how, at the launch of the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Sanctuary Series at the beginning of this month, bass-baritone Dashon Burton turned a problematic situation (recent recovery from a non-COVID related illness) into a memorable, albeit foreshortened, one. Such prevailing over adversity was so absent during the second Sanctuary Series program, a solo recital by violinist Johnny Gandelsman, that one could not help but wonder if his “secret mission” had been to create adversity. While his technical skills were, for the most part, straightforward, it was hard to avoid wondering whether his approach to performance had been calculated to provoke, if not offend, his audience. (To be fair, from my vantage point in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, I saw only one member of the audience make a discreet exit, which took place before Gandelsman’s program had hit its halfway mark.)

Gandelsman used most of that program to showcase six new works he commissioned through his This Is America project. One of those pieces, “O,” composed by Clarice Assad, which was jointly commissioned by Gandelsman and SFP, was given its world premiere performance. Sadly, to get to “O” the listener had to negotiate compositions by Conrad Tao (“Stones”), Ebun Oguntola (“Reflections”), and Tyshawn Sorey (“For Courtney Bryan”), the first two of which were given rambling (and often inchoate) introductory recorded accounts by the composers.

In other words, by the time Gandelsman turned his attention to “O,” mind had pretty much lost the capacity to tease signal out of noise. A similar fate befell the following offering, “A través del manto Luminoso” (through the luminous mantle) by Angélica Negrón. Only the foot-stomping fiddling of “New to the Session” by Rhiannon Giddens provided a comfort zone to wrap up the evening’s ordeal.

At the other extreme, Gandelsman warmed up his provocations with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Ironically, he selected his own transcription of the BWV 1009 solo cello suite. (Spoiler alert: Matt Haimovitz will play this music on the cello one week from this evening at the final Sanctuary Series concert.) Gandelsman’s attention seemed to be an intense focus on technical challenges. It does not seem to have occurred to him that, following the Prelude, all the movements are named after dance forms; and, as Elizabeth Blumenstock observed at a Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Bach really knew his dances. For Gandelsman the music seemed to be little more than a string of notes, one of which deliberately enabled a segue from one movement to its successor without the slightest pause.

As the old joke goes: Gandelsman played Bach last night, and Bach lost!