Frang Returns to Perform Berg Concerto with SFS

Violinist Vilde Frang (photograph by Marco Borggreve, courtesy of SFS)

Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang made her debut as soloist with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) about three years ago. Performing under Polish conductor Krzysztof Urbański, she took on the many challenges of Edward Elgar’s Opus 61 concerto in B minor and triumphed over all of them. Last night she returned to Davies Symphony Hall for the first of this week’s three subscription concerts. Once again she took on a major challenge, this time the violin concerto that Alban Berg completed shortly before his death in 1935. The orchestra was led this week by Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä.

The partnership could not have been better. Mäkelä was completely at home with the many thematic complexities that Berg packed into his score, while Frang glided her way smoothly through the many imposing technical challenges demanded by all those marks on paper. For those do not know the story, Berg composed this concerto on a commission from the violinist Louis Krasner. Berg know that Krasner was a prodigious virtuoso, so Berg invited him to his house to improvise the performance of particularly technically demanding passages. Berg then went into an adjoining room, leaving Krasner to explore to his heart’s content. As Berg listened to Krasner’s skills, he documented them in notation, returning to those documents when he began work on the concerto.

The result turned out to be a reflection on tragic circumstances. Berg dedicated his concerto “To the memory of an angel.” The “angel” was Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler (previously married to Gustav) and Walter Gropius. Manon contracted polio in her teens and died at the age of eighteen. Her death was woven into the conclusion of the concerto with a fantasia on the chorale theme “Es ist genug” (it is enough), which Berg may have selected for the chilling stepwise tritone that begins the first phrase. Ironically, Berg died on December 24, 1935, a few months after completing his violin concerto (leaving his Lulu opera unfinished) and about five months before Krasner first performed the concerto.

Krasner became its champion. There is even a 1936 recording of his performing the concerto with Anton Webern conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The performance took place only a few weeks after its premiere in Barcelona at the Palau de la Música Catalana, where it was conducted by Hermann Scherchen as part of an International Society for Contemporary Music Festival.

Frang rose to every challenge that Berg had summoned through his experiences with Krasner. There is a fierce cadenza that depicts Manon trying to fight off death and ultimately succumbing. Frang captured every detail of that cadenza with frightening intensity. For his part, Mäkelä teased out the many details in Berg’s rich instrumental fabric, plaintively contrasting the delights of Manon’s youth with her tragic end.

Intense expressiveness was equally present in the opening selection that preceded the concerto. This was the first SFS performance of “Perú negro,” composed by Jimmy López Bellido, who was inspired by Afro-Peruvian music. This genre grew out of the importation of Africans to serve as slaves after the Spanish had conquered Peru. Bellido scored his historical reflection for a very large ensemble with a diverse abundance of percussion. The score was only about a quarter of an hour in duration; but the listening experience was like a roller coaster ride, twisting and turning around any number of highly imaginative instrumental sonorities. Mäkelä has apparently performed this work many times with many different ensembles, and San Francisco was lucky to be part of his agenda.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 93 (tenth) symphony in E minor. This was composed in 1953 after the death of Joseph Stalin. By all rights that occasion should have been a relief, particularly among the many Stalin had persecuted (including Shostakovich). However, it was also a time of extreme anxiety, since the governmental bureaucracy was as uncertain as the general public as to what would happen next. That uncertainty spilled over into the Opus 93 symphony, whose overall architecture is disconcertingly uneven (perhaps to reflect the composer’s own uncertainties) and whose prevailing rhetoric culminates in an obsession with repetition that is likely to leave the attentive listener thoroughly exhausted.

From a strictly musical point of view, this is a score that comes very close to the edge of tedium, possibly crossing it every now and then; but Shostakovich’s techniques may well have been developed as an expression of that prevailing uncertainty, leaving the audience in a disturbed state that reflects the composer’s personal circumstances.