As was announced at the middle of last month (on the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, to be specific), the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Orchestral Series began the new year with debut performances by two guest conductors. Last week the conductor was Elim Chan, who delivered jaw-dropping accounts of a violin concerto by Sergei Prokofiev (Opus 26 in G minor) and an early (Opus 17) symphony by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, making the case that it deserved as much attention as the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies, all of which seem to be played to death on a regular basis. In addition, she began her program with the world premiere of Elizabeth Ogonek’s “Moondog.” The entire evening was as stimulating as bold of lightning.
Last night the old adage that lightning does not strike twice in the same place was proved wrong, much to the delight of an attentive and appreciative audience. The conductor was London-born Robin Ticciati, whose skills as a conductor were honed by both Colin Davis and Simon Rattle. (He is now the Sir Colin Davis Fellow of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music.) Watching him on the Davies Symphony Hall podium, one got a sense of his having cultivated a “Rattle image.” The good news is that the image was substantiated by a solid foundation of technique.
That technique was presented with a vengeance as Ticciati negotiated two highly ambitious undertakings. The more familiar of these was Gustav Mahler’s fourth symphony in G major. This is one of the composer’s more “traditional” efforts, following a conventional pattern of four movements with the slow movement structured as a double theme with variations. The one departure from convention comes with the final movement presented as a song setting for one of the texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, performed last night by soprano Ying Fang.
The first half of the program was devoted entirely to the SFS premiere of the first violin concerto composed by Jörg Widmann, which he completed in 2007. Widmann has made several appearances as a clarinetist in programs presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). More recently he has shifted his attention to composition, and SFP programming has provided a platform for several of his works.
Violinist Alina Ibragimova (photograph by Eva Vermandel, courtesy of SFS)
The violin soloist last night was Alina Ibragimova. The duration of Widmann’s concerto is about half an hour, and the violinist is never granted even the slightest pause in that period of time. The soloist must also contend with a large orchestral ensemble including an impressively diverse percussion section. Overall, the listening experience is one of being hit by a massive tidal wave of dissonant sonorities.
Indeed, it is important to use that noun “sonorities” rather than “themes.” The entire concerto amounts to a half-hour landscape of sonorities. Nevertheless, there is a clear sense that the acoustic qualities of those sonorities undergo an ongoing process of development that amount to a remote cousin to the practice of development in a “classical” sonata form.
Readers may recall that, when I wrote about “Moondog” last week, I wrote that Ogonek had chosen to work with acoustic textures rather than more conventional themes. The same can be said of Widmann’s concerto. Every instrument in his large ensemble seems to be contributing its own characteristic texture to a tapestry of almost cosmic proportions; and, at the “heart” of that tapestry, so to speak, one recognizes the interplay of the ensemble textures with those emerging from the solo violin part. The experience of listening then becomes one of navigating the full landscape of the textures, rather than recognizing both the statement and the development of thematic elements.
The overall result is that, over the course of two weeks, the attentive listeners that visit Davies have had the opportunity to rethink just what listening entails; and, judging from the enthusiastic applause, those listeners seem to have relished that attention.
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