Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Sibelius and Salonen Shine with SFS at Davies

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the only performance of the second of four programs highlighting the piano. However, the high point of the evening was the instrumental selection that followed the intermission, Jean Sibelius’ Opus 82 (fifth) symphony in E-flat major. This composition task did not come easy. The original version was completed in 1915, but Sibelius radically revised the score the following year. Even then, he was dissatisfied; and the symphony did not see its final version until 1919.

That final version now stands as one of the composer’s most provocative ventures into ambiguity. The attentive listener will have no trouble recognizing the thematic building blocks, but they come and go almost as if they had been conceived through stream of consciousness. While the original version provided at least some recognition of the conventional four-movement symphony, the final version amounts to a flow of episodes that have been grouped into three movements, possibly only for the sake of allowing the ensemble two brief pauses.

One of the reasons Sibelius kept reworking his score may have been because he was trying to get beyond the usual conventions of structuring a modest collection of themes. By the time he had completed the final version, he seemed to have found a rhetoric that amounted to a flow of episodic gestures. Any resemblances to traditional symphonic structures and rhetoric were little more than coincidental. Those departures from tradition come to a mind-bending head in the “cadence” (scare quotes intentional) of the entire symphony:

from the Wikipedia page for the Sibelius fifth symphony

Note that the spaces between the chords are deliberately never the same. The listener has no idea where Sibelius is going until the simple B-flat/E-flat cadence in octaves in the last two measures. This is a mind-bending experience, and last night Salonen knew just how to deliver it.

Considering the disappointment of the first half of the program, attentive listeners definitely deserved the provocative imagination behind Sibelius’ symphony. That first half accounted for “highlighting the piano.” The selection was Edvard Grieg’s familiar Opus 16 concerto in A minor. However, because the soloist was Lang Lang, the experience had less to do with highlighting the piano, preferring instead to highlight the pianist.

Mind you, there is no questioning the skill behind Lang’s command of the piano repertoire. However, he has a well-earned reputation for seeking out unexpected approaches to phrasing that tend to take any score by any composer and warp it beyond recognition. The result was that, with Salonen on the podium, the orchestral ensemble gave an engaging account of the full breadth of Grieg’s thematic vocabulary; and Lang Lang devoted his attention to delivering the most unconventional interpretations of each of the themes themselves. Ultimately, however, his performance was all about the cadenzas, which at least allowed him the liberty to be even more unconventional. Given the rousing applause from the audience, it would be fair to say that Lang Lang knew how to work that liberty to his advantage.

As expected, he took an encore. As was the case during his last Davies appearance, his diction and projection gave a poor account of his announcement of the selection. My own mind may have been wandering into weird places; but I came away thinking that he had played his own interpretation of the song “Feed the Bird (Tuppence a Bag),” composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman for the film Mary Poppins. I suppose that was the “Spoonful of Sugar” I needed to consume Lang Lang’s “medicine.”

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