Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) crossed the midway mark in its 40th anniversary season, led by Wattis Foundation Music Director Daniel Stewart. My last encounter with Stewart’s direction of the ensemble took place a year ago, and it involved a fair amount of disappointment. This time there were more sources of satisfaction, but there was still more disappointment than one would have wished.
The partnership of conductor and musicians was at its best during the second half of the program, which was devoted entirely to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 (fifth) symphony in C minor. It is hard to imagine anyone that has not come in contact with the opening motif one way or another:
from the Wikipedia page for the symphony being discussed
However, those who know this music only through recordings may be unaware that the motif begins with a rest, thinking that it is just a triplet followed by a sustained note.
Nevertheless, as the first movement develops, one comes to realize that those three notes are an upbeat, leaving the conductor with the challenge of handling that opening rest. This is a subtle matter; but Stewart’s chemistry with his ensemble made it clear that everyone involved know this was an upbeat, rather than a downbeat. Metaphorically, the engine was “revved up” for the wild ride that would ensue (during which it would become more and more evident that Beethoven wanted those three notes to be an upbeat)! As is almost always the case, the motif set the tone for the first movement; and the first movement set the tone for the three movements that would follow. (By the time the symphony has advanced to the third movement, the upbeat has “graduated” into a downbeat!)
At the other end of the program, the opening selection was Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra.” Stewart provided some useful remarks in preparing the audience for the composition’s three-movement structure. I have been following Frank’s reflections on the Peruvian side of her ancestry for several years, but this was my first encounter with her taking on a tone poem for full orchestra (with generous percussion). From that point of view, I felt that Stewart never really established the context for this music; but Frank’s own program note (provided courtesy of the Wise Music Group) could not have been more informative. Personally, I was also a bit amused to find the rhetoric of Béla Bartók lurking in the final movement; and nothing would please me more than further opportunities to get to know this music better.
However, the “main event” of the afternoon involved the winner of the 2022 SFSYO Concerto Competition. That winner was Eunseo Oh, who is the SFSYO Concertmaster. Her competition selection was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s only violin concerto, his Opus 35 in D major. This is bold and passionate music, much of which involved the interplay of the soloist with the forces of a full symphony orchestra.
Sadly, while Oh demonstrated a clear and engaging account of all the challenges Tchaikovsky had put into the solo violin part, on far too many occasions her playing was overshadowed by the large ensemble. At the age of seventeen, Oh is still building up the strength necessary to contend with the wide dynamic range of just about any violin concerto from the Romantic period. While she had clearly thought through her strategies for dealing with the expressiveness of her part, those gems of expressiveness were not always audible enough to be appreciated. Even in the cavernous space of Davies Symphony Hall, this probably could have been resolved by reducing the size of the instrumental ensemble; but I know better than to try to argue a case for that strategy!
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