Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the third of four programs highlighting the piano. He scheduled these to precede his first European residencies tour with SFS, which will begin on March 9. This particular program was the only one in which the pianist, Conor Hanick, was making his SFS debut.
Samuel Adams (photograph by Lenny Gonzalez, courtesy of SFS)
That debut accounted for the entire first half of the program, in which “first contact” involved more than the soloist. Hanick performed the solo piano part for the world premiere of “No Such Spring,” composed by Samuel Adams on an SFS commission. This was very much music emerging from the pandemic; but the title was chosen to suggest an implicit narrative, which reflects the composer’s having listened to Igor Stravinsky’s music for the ballet “The Rite of Spring” around the time that Russia began to invade Ukraine.
Like Stravinsky’s ballet score, “No Such Spring” requires a very large ensemble, which includes extensive percussion resources. In the nine lines describing the instrumentation in the program book, a little over six of them were required to account for percussion instruments. One would think that the pianist would have a major job in contending with the orchestra, but Adams had just the right sense of balance to “level the playing field” between soloist and ensemble.
In his pre-concert discussion with Chief Artistic Officer Phillippa Cole, Adams deftly escorted his audience through the ideas behind the three movements of his composition: “Colorfugue,” “Double Variations,” and “Garden of Wire and Wood.” The last of those titles reflected his own description of the piano; and it was interesting to note that both of the other two titles served to reflect centuries of past traditions of musical practices. That said, the music as it was then performed was very much a product of the immediate present.
Over the course of about half an hour, Adams wasted no time in cracking the “energy coefficient” up to “eleven” and sustaining it all the way through to the final measures. Salonen had clearly internalized the many details of instrumental interplay, consistently doing justice to the distribution of energy for the sake of rhetorical intensity. Any attentive listener could easily relish all of those details, particularly when the auditory experiences were coupled with the visual impressions of both conductor and ensemble determined to do justice to the composer’s score. This is music that encourages attentive listening; and, hopefully, it will be able to sustain a place in contemporary repertoire that will extend beyond its premiere performance.
The second half of the program was also devoted to a single composition, reaching back about a century and a half to Anton Bruckner’s sixth symphony in A major. This was last performed when Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt visited SFS in February of 2010. At that time I was still trying to hone my listening skills where Bruckner was concerned, and Blomstedt’s performance could not have been a better source of guidance. Over the course of that thirteen-year interval, I have become much better attuned to the uniqueness of Bruckner’s approach to expressiveness. Last night I was delighted to find that Salonen’s account of this symphony was as absorbing as my previous experience with Blomstedt.
The impact of that listening experience had much to do with the extent to which a Bruckner symphony movement amounts to a journey through the unfolding of a series of sonorities. One might almost liken any of those movements to a narrative accounting for unfamiliar events in an unfamiliar language. It is up to the conductor to extract an underlying sense of “meaning” from that unfamiliarity, and Salonen know how to “mine” that meaning for all it was worth.
For about half a decade, I have cultivated my Bruckner listening skills primarily through experiences of listening to Blomstedt on recordings as well as in performances in Davies; last night I came to appreciate that my skills can be further honed by Salonen.
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