Zhang’s Imaginative “Three Centuries” Program

SFS Visiting Conductor Xian Zhang (photograph by B Ealovega, courtesy of SFS)

This week’s subscription series of concerts by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony Hall saw the return of conductor Xian Zhang. She made her SFS debut in 2018 conducting the annual Chinese New Year Concert and is currently Music Director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. She prepared a “three centuries” program presented in reverse chronological order.

The program began with the first SFS performance of Nokuthula Ngwenyama’s “Primal Message,” which she completed last year. The twentieth century was represented by Florence Price’s 1933 piano concerto. Finally, the second half of the program was devoted entirely to Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 95 (ninth) symphony in E minor, composed in 1893 and best known by its subtitle, “From the New World.”

Zhang conducted the premiere performance of “Primal Message,” leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in November of 2020 (under pandemic conditions). Since then she has championed the music through other engagements as visiting conductor. Ngwenyama originally composed the work as a viola quintet, subsequently expanding it for string orchestra with harp and percussion.

The title refers to how we might make contact with other intelligent species in the universe, suggesting musical structure as an appropriate medium for communication. Fortunately, the music does not immerse itself in technical details shared between communication theory and music theory. Instead, it unfolds a meditative rhetoric based on the premise that we may not be alone in the cosmos; and that meditation says all it has to say over the course of about ten minutes. Zhang’s mastery of a rhetoric of quietude made this “first contact listening” experience an engaging one.

The concerto soloist was Aaron Diehl, last seen with SFS in Davies for last year’s annual Fourth of July concert. This turned out to be a “historically informed” performance of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” with a generous share of improvisations on Diehl’s part. (For those who think they are purists in this matter, Gershwin had not yet committed the piano part to writing when he gave the first performance of this composition.)

Like Gershwin’s rhapsody, Price’s concerto was structured as a single movement. However, that one movement amounted to three episodes corresponding to the fast-slow-fast structure of most three-movement piano concertos. Since “Rhapsody in Blue” was first performed in 1924, Price was probably well aware of it; and she was not shy when it came to jazzy gestures in her rhetoric. Nevertheless, this is very much a “concert music” offering with a variety of stimulating approaches to instrumentation to cast different shades of light on the solo piano work.

While many may approach Dvořák’s symphony as a “familiar old friend,” Zhang’s account was stimulating from beginning to end. She led the composition without a score, focusing all of her attention on the full rich scope of instrumental parts blending and contrasting with prodigious diversity. In her Inside Music Talk Sarah Cahill suggested a parallel of the composer’s ninth symphony with the similarly-numbered symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. This is a bit anachronistic because Dvořák’s symphony was first published as his fifth, and it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that his four early symphonies were “officially” added to the catalog.

If this symphony does have an influence in the past, Hector Berlioz’ “Symphonie fantastique” would be a more viable candidate. Both are structured around a theme that appears in all of the movements (five for Berlioz, four for Dvořák). Both also have strong narrative qualities, even if any “topic” for narration is not particularly specific. In Dvořák’s case, I rather like the way in which he reminds listeners of the primary theme of the first movement as the symphony progresses. By the time the listener has reached the final movement (s)he knows that theme will recur; but Dvořák keeps his listener in suspense, not letting it appear until the coda!

Zhang’s management of the overall flow of the symphony could not have been better. She could bring out details that had not crossed my mind since my score-following days. She also had a clear sense of the dramatic rhetoric behind each of the four movements, finding just the right point of balance for both differentiation and continuity. The result was a welcome reminder of how even the most familiar compositions can still be refreshing when imaginatively interpreted.