Salonen Adds Sibelius to SFSymphony+ Site

This morning the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) released its third video of the year for on-demand streaming through the SFSymphony+ Web site. Readers may recall that last week SFS uploaded a video of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen leading an ensemble of fourteen strings in a performance of Carl Nielsen’s Opus 1 “little” suite. Today’s upload is another relatively short suite for a small string ensemble, Jean Sibelius’ Opus 14 Rakastava (the lover).

This music originated in 1894 as a cycle of four a cappella songs for men’s chorus. The texts were taken from the Kanteletar, a collection of Finnish folk poems. Sibelius subsequently arranged the music for mens chorus and string orchestra and then for mixed choir. The three-movement instrumental version was completed in 1912 and was cataloged as his Opus 12. The music was scored for strings and one percussionist playing timpani and triangle. By way of context, 1912 was also the year in which Sibelius composed his Opus 63 (fourth) symphony in A minor (although in three of the four movements Sibelius’ approach to tonality was daringly ambiguous).

The SFS violinists in this recorded performance of Rakastava were Nadya Tichman, Melissa Kleinbart, In Sun Jang, Jessie Fellows, Raushan Akhmedyarova, and John Chisholm. These were presumably three first violins and three seconds, joined by two violists, Yun Jie Liu and Nanci Severance. The cellists were Peter Wyrick, Carolyn McIntosh, and Jill Rachuy Brindel. The bassists were Scott Pingel and Brian Marcus, and Edward Stephan managed the timpani and triangle. Unless I am mistaken, both Tichman and Wyrick contributed solo passages to the overall texture.

There was a decided intimacy to the poems that inspired this music, and that intimacy prevailed over the reduced resources of the string ensemble. As can be seen below, the string players were more distanced than they would have been for a full symphony performance:

Screen shot from the video being discussed

In that same photograph one can see three of the remote-controlled cameras used for video capture. The director clearly wanted listeners to be aware of what the individual musicians were doing. The camera pointed directly at Liu facilitated awareness of how the viola part contributed to the overall texture.

The music itself presents Sibelius at his most intimate, and Salonen’s conducting played a major role in establishing that rhetoric of intimacy.