SFS Presents Beethoven’s Two-Act Ballet

Salvatore Viganò, who created the scenario and choreography for Beethoven’s Prometheus ballet score (from the Archivio Storio Ricordi, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) presented its first performance of the entire score of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 43 ballet score, The Creatures of Prometheus. This marked the return of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen for the first of three weeks of subscription concerts. Opus 43 was the product of Beethoven’s partnership with choreographer Salvatore Viganò, who, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, was serving as ballet master in Vienna. Viganò is sometimes credited with introducing narrative ballet, consisting of the interleaving of pantomime and classical dance movements.

Viganò’s narrative for Opus 43 involved playfully toying with the early episodes of Greek mythology. The title denotes the legend that, before he got into trouble playing with fire, Prometheus molded a mass of mud into the shapes of two human figures (presumably one male and one female). (Anyone that recalls Figures of Earth at this point will receive an appreciative nod!) The narrative then follows these “creatures” as Prometheus introduces them to his Olympian colleagues and how, over their course of their experiences, they gradually acquire the spirit of humanity.

Filled with a moderately generous-sized ensemble, the Davies stage had little room for this choreographic narrative to be properly danced. Instead, Hillary Leben created an animation projected on screens on either side of the stage, which provided a visual account of the narrative. That narrative was written by Gerard McBurney and delivered by Keith David. For the most part, the animations followed each of the episodes narrated by David, after which the realization of that episode in music was performed. Audience members thus got to follow both narrative and music through a succession of events based on Viganò’s scenario.

Leben’s style of imagery was imaginatively child-like. Perhaps that was her way of emphasizing that the ballet amounted to a “coming of age” story set, ironically, in a land of immortals. Each of her images had its own stamp of humor, the perfect complement to Beethoven’s music during a period when wit played a key element in the rhetoric of his compositions.

Salonen was clearly aware of that infrastructure of wit. I am not sure I have ever seen so much good nature emanating from the Davies podium prior to last night. The ensemble was clearly aware of Salonen’s high spirits and responded in kind through each of the many episodes that unfolded through Beethoven’s score. My only disappointment emerged during an Adagio near the beginning of the second act, which served up a ravishingly extended cello solo. Sadly, the cellist, whose face was unfamiliar, was never named. [added 2/26, 7:35 a.m.: The cellist was identified in Joshua Kosman’s San Francisco Chronicle review as “Rainer Eudeikis, who currently serves as principal cello of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.”]

Taken as a whole, however, this approach to presenting one of the less familiar items in the Beethoven catalog could not have been more engaging, leaving me wondering what other surprises from the Classical era Salonen might have in mind for future performances.