This past April violinist Randall Goosby made his recital debut in Davies Symphony Hall in the second of the four Spotlight Series concerts presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Last night he returned to Davies, this time to make his debut as a soloist with SFS. His concerto selection also involved a debut.
Florence Price’s D minor (second) violin concerto was composed in 1952 but was presumed lost until the 2009 discovery of previously unknown manuscripts and personal papers. Since then there has be a sort of “cottage industry” involved with preparing those manuscripts for performance. Last night SFS benefitted from those efforts, presenting its first performance of the concerto.
Price had a gift for expressing bold rhetorical strokes without trivializing them. Much of her impact can be attributed to imaginative approaches to instrumentation. Those approaches were immediately evident last night in the opening measures of the concerto. Most startling was her requirement of fortissimo playing on the celesta, an instrument whose dynamic range is relatively narrow. Nevertheless, when the full ensemble roared out its first thematic material, the celesta was there roaring with them.
The concerto itself is a single-movement composition, whose sections tend to reflect the nineteenth-century conventions of multiple-movement concertos. However, the “strong suit” in Price’s creativity involved instrumentation; and novel gestures of unconventional coloration pervaded the entire concerto. Goosby’s violin solo work then blended perfectly into those instrumental textures; and, every now and then, there seemed to be hints of past violinists that Price may had admired earlier in her life. One example was an opening violin gesture that seemed to channel memories of Fritz Kreisler.
If there was any downside to the listening experience, it was the risk of feeling overwhelmed by the scope of Price’s inventiveness. Nevertheless, Goosby brought a sure hand to managing that scope in his solo performances, while Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen brought the same command to managing the ensemble accompaniment. The result was a stimulating “first contact” experience that could not have been more satisfying.
As expected, Goosby returned to the stage to give a solo encore performance. He decided to revisit one of the encores that he had played in Davies during his previous appearance. This was“Louisiana Blues Strut: A Cakewalk,” composed by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson in 2002. From a personal point of view, I was delighted to have my memory jogged by that selection, particularly since I have also heard it performed by Augustin Hadelich.
Price’s broad strokes were followed, after the intermission, by the even broader strokes of Richard Strauss. The “symphony” portion of the program was devoted to his Opus 30 tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra,” inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s “philosophical fiction,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The notes in the program book by James M. Keller provided a useful enumeration of the episodes in this tone poem, all of which were taken from section titles in Nietzsche’s text.
It is unclear how much of the text itself influenced Strauss. Nevertheless, in the context my overall familiarity with Strauss tone poems, Opus 30 has one of the clearer structural foundations, which leads the attentive listener from one episode to another. How much Strauss actually grasped in the Nietzsche source is left as an exercise for the listener!
More important was the attentive skill that Salonen brought to leading the full forces of the SFS ensemble. He knew how to establish the full force of intensity without letting his rhetorical devices go over the top. I also realized that only in the physical presence of an ensemble in the proper setting can one appreciate the low-frequency organ tones that evoke an almost visceral sense of listening.
Salonen began the program with the overture to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 486 one-act comic singspiel entitled “Der Schauspieldirektor” (the impresario). Mozart composed it for a competition that Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II arranged with Antonio Salieri as the competitor. Both of them reflected on the “social world” of vocal performers in which vanity tends to triumph over technique. The K. 486 overture was given a brisk account by Salonen, serving to “warm up” the audience for the concerto that would follow. The good news is that Goosby was so wrapped up in his solo work that any shades of vanity associated with K. 486 were quickly forgotten.
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