Mendelssohn and Shakespeare Launch SFS Gala

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) launched its 2022–23 season with its annual Opening Night Gala. The entire program was organized around William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This involved a streamlined version of the play prepared by L. Peter Callender, Artistic Director of the African-American Shakespeare Company, enhanced with music by Felix Mendelssohn.

As expected, the evening began with Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen leading SFS in Mendelssohn’s Opus 21 overture inspired by Shakespeare’s play. The incidental music that Mendelssohn subsequently published as his Opus 61 was then interleaved with Callendar’s double-casting (and triple- in one case) of the major episodes in the narrative, given continuity with narration by Raj Mathai and Tony Bravo. Costumes were not part of the production; and, because of the limited space on the Davies stage, any “sense of place” was established through imaginatively inventive lighting designed by Luke Kritzeck. The sense of “midsummer” was established by paper spheres, each enclosing a single light bulb. The prevailing color was blue for the night sky with a single white sphere depicting the moon (which wandered about the sky from one episode to the next).

In such a setting Mendelssohn was clearly “incidental” to Shakespeare, even when the text was highly abbreviated. Nevertheless, Salonen brought a freshness to the SFS performance with the intricacy of his account of the Opus 21 overture, after which he seemed to content to play “second banana” to Callender’s staging. Midsummer gets performed so often that it runs the risk of viewers growing tired of the return of the usual jokes and plot twists. Still, there was a casual freshness to last night’s performance. The players knew that, even on a limited space, they were there to entertain; and, for the most part, the old jokes returned with fresh and inventive deliveries.

The result was a never-a-dull-moment account of familiar Shakespeare distilled into a heady 90-minute brew. Shakespeare’s language was enhanced by the choral selections, performed by the women of the SFS Chorus directed by David J. Xiques. What was most important, however, was how the partnership of Salonen and Callender resulted in a production in which neither music nor text was short-changed.