CBSO Launches SFS Great Performers Series

CBSO Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (photograph by Frans Jansen, courtesy of SFS)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall saw the launch of the 2022–23 Great Performers Series presented by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). The first of the ten programs in this Series presented a visit by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), led by conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and featuring cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason as concerto soloist. Kanneh-Mason made his San Francisco debut this past April in another Great Performers concert at Davies, joined on that occasion by his sister Isata at the piano. For his debut in Davies as a concerto soloist, he selected Edward Elgar’s Opus 85 cello concerto in E minor.

For her instrumental selections Gražinytė-Tyla presented instrumental music taken from two operas from two consecutive centuries. The program began with Benjamin Britten’s Opus 33a, composed in 1945. This was a suite of four extended instrumental passages from his Peter Grimes opera (Opus 33), which Britten called “Sea Interludes.” The intermission was followed by a four-movement symphony that Thomas Adès created in 2020 based on thematic material from his The Exterminating Angel opera. The program concluded with Claude Debussy’s three-movement tone poem “La Mer.”

As a recitalist, Kanneh-Mason had provided a highly imaginative program for four interconnected sonatas, which made for some thoroughly engaging reading in the program book followed by an equally engaging listening experience. His approach to Elgar’s Opus 85 may not have been as intricately cerebral, but his interpretation provided a rich account of the full scope of the composer’s dispositions. Since I have a more-than-generous supply of recordings of this concerto, I never have any problems with following the composer’s thematic logic; but I was still impressed by the breath of expressive approaches that Kanneh-Mason mined over the course of the concerto’s four movements.

Following his well-deserved ovation, Kanneh-Mason decided that the audience deserved a broader cello experience. He thus recruited the four performers on the first two stands in the cello section to perform a five-voice account of a Bach chorale. Which Bach chorale? This enquiring mind wanted to know! During the intermission, I approached the leader of the cello section; and all he could show me was a single sheet of paper with the music he had just played … no title and not even a BWV number! Suffice it to say that the music provided meditative quietude after the passionate outpourings of the cello concerto. [added 10/17, 10:05 a.m.:

Cyberspace to the rescue! Multiple sources identified the encore selection as a song, rather than a chorale. The title of the song is “Komm, süßer Tod” (come sweet death, BWV 478), one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 33 contributions to the Musicalisches Gesang-Buch compiled by Georg Christian Schemelli in 1736. (The total number of songs in the collection is 954.) These were published in figured bass notation as follows:

from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Presumably, Kanneh-Mason prepared his own four-voice realization of the figured bass for the accompaniment to the vocal line. (This arrangement was recorded on his recently released Song album.)]

For that matter, where “passionate outpourings” are concerned, Gražinytė-Tyla’s approach to Britten’s interludes could not have been more engaging. By departing from the visual element of the opera experience, Britten could engage the full attention of the listener with a multitude of rich sonorities based on imaginative blends of his instrumental resources. The interludes themselves do not follow the ordering of the opera’s narrative. Rather, they are ordered by time-of-day, beginning with dawn and concluding with a midnight storm, whose calming coda adds one final excerpt from the opera score to the mix. Gražinytė-Tyla definitely knew the best way to introduce the full extent of her orchestra to the audience.

Sadly, the second half of the program she prepared was far less engaging. I have to confess that my familiarity with The Exterminating Angel is limited to having seen the PBS broadcast of its performance by the Metropolitan Opera. I found that I could only negotiate that performance by rousing up as many memories of the Luis Buñuel film on which the libretto was based as I could muster. Under those circumstances, the music had about as much impact as the furniture (if that much).

Through past experiences of Adès performances by the San Francisco Symphony, I knew that loud and louder were the composer’s favorite dynamic levels. Notwithstanding the usual Spinal Tap joke about cranking the amplifier up to eleven, Gražinytė-Tyla took the second movement of Adès’ symphony (a march), and cranked the volume level all the way to the threshold of pain and then crossed that threshold. Again I had to reflect back on Buñuel and the subtle quietude with which his fascinatingly perverse plot unfolded.

Unfortunately, that rhetoric of overblown dynamics spilled over into the concluding Debussy selection. Yes, there are several stunning moments in the composer’s approach to imagery that deserve intense dynamics. Indeed, there is a lush grandeur to the coda of the final movement that almost suggests familiarity with the rich Yiddish connotations of “kvell.” Unfortunately, Gražinytė-Tyla seemed interested in little more than amplitude, rather than its impact on personal dispositions. Debussy definitely deserved better.