Violinist Leila Josefowicz (photograph by Chris Lee, courtesy of SFS)
Yesterday afternoon Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the first performance of the last of the programs he had prepared for the course of three weeks. Most of the program was devoted to the music of Igor Stravinsky, a composer that has held a dominating position in Salonen’s repertoire (along with a generous number of recordings available on the Sony label). The concerto soloist for the program was violinist Leila Josefowicz. Readers may recall that she performed Salonen’s own violin concerto in February of 2020, when Salonen launched his “pre-tenure” in Davies Symphony Hall, performing as SFS Music Director Designate.
This week’s program continues their partnership with Josefowicz performing Stravinsky’s violin concerto. Perhaps the most salient impression left by this performance was the unabashed joy so evident in her facial expressions and body language. There is little anecdotal evidence of Stravinsky having a sense of humor; but this concerto dazzles with what John Cage liked to call “a sunny disposition.” Even the two back-to-back Aria movements in the center of the structure twinkled like the night stars in a Forties Hollywood movie. From a structural point of view, all four of the movements are based on traditional forms, thus reflecting what has been called Stravinsky’s “neoclassical” style. However, in the context of that formality, there are no end of prankish gestures (some for the ensemble as well as the soloist); and Salonen provided the perfect partner for Josefowicz’ consistently dazzling rhetoric.
Following the intermission, all that bubbling joy gave way to the unabashed raucousness of Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring.” I purchased my study score for this music back when I was in high school, and I continue to marvel at the composer’s capacity for piling a handful of distinctive motifs all on top of each other. No matter how many times I followed a recording with that score, I was never able to keep track of all the notes that Stravinsky had poured into it.
Yesterday afternoon I did not have the score on my lap, but I did not need it. Salonen’s skills of balance brought me closer to teasing out the many different simultaneous motifs than I had ever previously achieved. Mind you, I was well-enough positioned to view a generous number of SFS players; and watching finger movement and body language often facilitated recognizing a particular motif in a pile of simultaneities. However, even without help from that “visual channel,” I have to say that Salonen’s interpretation significantly added to my awareness of the many devices that Stravinsky wrote into his score. One might almost say that one could listen to Salonen with one ear tracking different details while the other ear assembled everything into “the big picture.”
Salonen also commanded the full resources of a large ensemble for the opening selection, the SFS premiere performance of Elizabeth Ogonek’s “Sleep & Remembrance.” The music was inspired by a poem by Wisława Szymborska entitled “While Sleeping.” Ogonek read that poem (in English) prior to the performance; but I have to confess that listening to the music would have been facilitated had I been able to consult the text in print while the music was being played. On the other hand, given the large extent of those resources, listening was definitely facilitated by Salonen’s gift for guiding the listener from one category of sonorities to another.
In many ways, the listening experience served to complement that of Fang Man’s “Song of the Flaming Phoenix,” which Salonen had conducted last week. Both of the pieces tended to organize themselves around a rhetoric of sonorities, rather than the traditional frameworks of harmonic progression and polyphony. Both Fang and Ogonek worked with particularly large ensembles. However, each had her own skills in structuring the sonorities emerging from those ensembles; and each enjoyed the luxury of Salonen’s clear account of the full diversity of those sonorities.
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