Last night in Davies Symphony Hall Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the first of three performances of the final subscription program in the 2021–22 season of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). This was basically an overture-concerto-symphony program with both the overture and the concerto receiving their first SFS performances. These were, respectively, Steven Stucky’s “Radical Light” and John Adams’ “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” with pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. The symphony was Jean Sibelius’ Opus 82 (fifth) in E-flat major.
Salonen was clearly in his comfort zone conducting this symphony. There is a sense of a vast expanse that is so intricately crafted that, in 1919, the composer pared down the version he had completed in 1915 from four movements to three. While the overall duration of the symphony is half an hour, there is an intensity to the pace of all three of those movements through which one loses all sense of the passing of time. Indeed, the concluding coda is so meticulous in its extensive use of rests that time only “gets back into joint” with the concluding perfect cadence:
from the Wikipedia page for Sibelius’ Opus 82
If Salonen provided a first-rate account of Sibelius’ command of craft at its finest, whether it involved imaginative phrasing or ingenious instrumentation, neither of the preceding offerings rose to those same heights. Stucky composed “Radical Light” for Salonen during the latter’s tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was originally composed for a series of concerts planned as a Sibelius festival. Apparently, “Radical Light” was performed between Sibelius’ final (seventh) symphony, Opus 105 in C major, and his intensely ambiguous Opus 63 (fourth) in A minor.
Stucky’s rich instrumentation provided an excellent complement to Sibelius’ own approaches to orchestration. However, Stucky’s score was far richer in the percussion section while, ironically, ignoring the timpani entirely. It was decidedly briefer than any of the Sibelius symphonies. However, once the opening gestures had been established, the attentive listener could be forgiven for wondering if the composer had run out of things to say. Indeed, there was almost a sense of “enough is enough” that set in less than halfway through the performance.
Even more disappointing was Adams’ latest venture into music for piano and orchestra, composed for Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed on March 7, 2019 with Yuja Wang as piano soloist. There has always been a prankish side to Adams’ work, the best example of which remains his raucous “Grand Pianola Music” with two pianos, abundant percussion, and three female vocalists channeling The Supremes. Where his latest concertante work is concerned, the question is not one of who has “all the good tunes” as it is one of when the piano will back off and let us listen to the rest of the orchestra.
Mind you, there is no shortage of good raucous humor in the score. Indeed, the gags play out from the very first measures, which are sure to remind anyone of my age that the theme music for the television detective series Peter Gunn first brought Henry Mancini to public attention. Nevertheless, none of Adams’ “good tunes” ever rise to the wit that abounded back in his “Grand Pianola” days; and, as a result, I came away from this music more with wistful melancholy than with a bounce in my step.
Fortunately, there were a few intimations of such bounce in Ólafsson’s encore selection. He played the three very brief selections that Béla Bartók collected under the title Hungarian Folksongs from the Csík District. Simplicity and quietude were just the right antidote to assist recovering from the excesses of Adams’ concerto.
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