Reinhardt’s SFS Debut Not Her Finest Hour

SFS Guest Conductor Ruth Reinhardt (photograph by Jessica Schaefer, courtesy of SFS)

This is the last of the five weeks of guest conductors visiting the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). This week’s conductor is German-born Ruth Reinhardt, who has visited a wide variety of ensembles in both Europe and the United States; and this was her SFS debut. The first half to the program was devoted entirely to two premieres of recent compositions. The intermission was then followed by Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 76 (fifth) symphony in F major, which was originally published in 1888 as his third.

That symphony provided the only opportunity to listen to how Reinhardt approached the nineteenth-century repertoire. She clearly appreciated the rich rhetoric that Dvořák brought to this relatively early symphony. Unfortunately, she had a tendency to go “over the top,” overstating the richness of that rhetoric, rather than giving it a more nuanced contour of the wide variety of dispositions that the composer had conceived as the threads of his overall fabric. Nevertheless, the SFS musicians seemed to appreciate the ways in which her intensity provided more than ample opportunities for every voice to establish its own content and context.

This is more than can be said of the new works on the first half of the program. The opening selection was the first SFS performance of “Om fotspår och ljus” (of footprints and light), written by Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski and given the subtitle “Helsinki Variations.” The score amounted to a landscape of instrumental sonorities and textures, with particular attention to a highly diverse percussion section. However, the ambiguity of the overall structure was punctuated with quotations from an unfinished opera by Ida Moberg entitled Asiens ljus (light of Asia). Thus, the effect was one of wandering through an unknown region and encountering landmarks that seemed familiar without actually being so. This made for a fascinating concept. However, even though the running time was about ten minutes; and listening experience felt like it went on forever.

Similarly, the West Coast premiere of the piano concerto that Mason Bates composed for pianist Daniil Trifonov overstayed its welcome sooner rather than later. This was a bit disappointing, since the overall architecture consisted of three movements, each reflecting the rhetoric of a different period in music history. Furthermore, there was a certain playfulness in Bates’ plan, holding off on any perceived sense of interplay between soloist and ensemble until the final movement. All of this looked very good on paper (and, for that matter, sounded promising in the pre-concert talk given by Sarah Cahill); but Bates never seemed to find the right pace for unfolding the flow of the concerto’s three disparate movements. Nevertheless, Trifonov certainly brought some impressive technical skills to his keyboard work, making it unfortunate that those skills were never put to particularly good use.