Pianist Behzod Abduraimov (photograph by Evgeny Eutykhov, courtesy of SFS)
This morning I realized that I have been following Juraj Valčuha’s visits to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) since his debut as guest conductor in May of 2013. He is Slovakian, and it is clear that his passions lie in Eastern European music with a noticeable bias towards the twentieth century. Last night in Davies Symphony Hall that bias took him to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 45 “Symphonic Dances” and Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 16 (second) piano concerto in G minor. His soloist was Behzod Abduraimov, who made his SFS debut performing that composer’s Opus 26 (third) concerto in C major with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting in March of 2018. Both of these compositions provided SFS with opportunities to display instrumental sonorities at their richest.
Prokofiev himself served as soloist in the premiere performance of Opus 16, which was conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in Paris in 1924. It would be fair to say that the composer had been very generous in providing lengthy and elaborate material for the soloist. Nevertheless, when the composer allows the orchestra to have its say, the contrasts between ensemble and piano are engagingly rich. The concerto is structured in four movements with an overall duration of about half an hour, but the prevailing rhetoric amounts to a radical departure from “classical structure” and more traditional concerto rhetoric.
Abduraimov’s account of the almost overwhelming demands on the piano soloist was positively riveting. He left the impression that he was intensely focused on every note (and, believe me, there were a lot of them) and that he knew how to convey the full scope of Prokofiev’s rhetorical dispositions. Valčuha did not seem to mind that his own activities were far fewer in number. Nevertheless, when the orchestra was allowed its occasional moments to have its say, he made sure that message came across loud and clear (and, where Prokofiev is concerned, “loud” often means “going all the way to eleven”).
Besides, Valčuha knew that, after the intermission, there would be more than enough to do in presenting Rachmaninoff’s Opus 45. I suspect that many listeners are inclined to wonder just what Opus 45 has to do with dance. In fact the music was conceived for Michel Fokine, who had previously created choreography for Opus 43, the “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Indeed, Fokine listened to the score even before Eugene Ormandy, who would premiere the composition with the Philadelphia Orchestra on January 3, 1941. Fokine would die the following August. As I recall, I saw the efforts of a significantly lesser choreographer (whose name I have forgotten) in the Seventies; and I wished that he had left well enough alone! (I think the title of the choreography was “Beach,” and that should have been a red flag unto itself!)
What is particularly interesting about Opus 45 is the composer’s command of richly innovative instrumentation. (It is not often that we get to see a saxophonist take a bow in Davies.) For all of his reputation as a virtuoso pianist and a composer of challenging music for that instrument, Opus 45 reveals no end of adventurous insights involving both solo work and innovative instrumental groupings. The thematic material may not be as rich in those insights, but there were any number of opportunities to experience the full extent of SFS sonorities in their realization of Rachmaninoff’s score.
As might be guessed, these two twentieth-century giants dominated the entire evening. Things did not go quite as well for Hannah Kendall, whose “The Spark Catchers” began the program with its SFS premiere. As I had observed in my preview article for this concert, the composition amounts to a ten-minute tone poem about hazardous working conditions in nineteenth-century Britain. Sadly, this was a case in which the notes for the program book by Benjamin Pesetsky were more engaging than the music itself. Unfortunately, I was not able to listen to Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct her music with SFS in October of last year. To be fair, this was one of many concerts around the world in which Kendall’s music has been performed; but I have the uneasy feeling that her interest in agenda may tend to overwhelm her rhetorical approach to composing music.
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