Many readers are probably aware by now of the marathon concert that pianist Yuja Wang brought to Carnegie Hall at the end of this past January to honor the year of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sergei Rachmaninoff on April 1, 1873. Performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, she delivered a two-and-a-half-hour program accounting for the four Rachmaninoff piano concertos, along with the “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” added for good measure to cover all of the composer’s works for piano and orchestra.
Last night Wang returned to Davies Symphony Hall as an artist in the Great Performers Series. On this occasion she limited her Rachmaninoff to the Opus 30 (third) concerto in D minor with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. This may be the most challenging of the four concertos; but, as I observed when the concerto was last performed in Davies in June of 2018, it is not the monster that the movie Shine made it out to be. Indeed, the good news is that Shine is now so far in the distant past that no one thinks about it any more.
Nevertheless, Opus 30 is still a demanding composition. However, Wang clearly knew how to rise to the technical challenges of all of those demands while also bringing out the rich lyricism of Rachmaninoff’s themes. Clearly, none of those challenges intimidated her; and there was something utterly delightful in how her rhetorical delivery always had room for playfulness.
Zachary Woolfe’s account of the Carnegie performance for The New York Times also observed that, at the end of the program, she returned for “no fewer than three” encores. The only one that Woolfe cited was Giovanni Sgambati’s “Melody from ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’,” his transcription of the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from the opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck. That was the second of the two encores that Wang played last night. This was preceded by Franz Liszt’s adaptation of Franz Schubert’s D. 118 “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” song with text taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust.
Opus 30 was composed in 1909. For the first half of the program, Salonen conducted two works both of which were completed over a hundred years later. The first of these was Gabriella Smith’s “Tumblebird Contrails,” which the San Francisco Youth Orchestra performed almost exactly a year ago. Readers may recall that my reaction to that offering was on the negative side. Fortunately, Salonen brought more understanding to the music. He would later address the audience citing Richard Strauss as the “grandfather” of the symphonic poem.
For my part, I was more interested in more recent influences. Smith’s approaches to textures recalled György Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” without explicitly appropriating his music. There was also a certain playfulness, which, for me at least, recalled John Adams’ “Grand Pianola Music.” I also found this a sobering reminder of how much times have changed. Back in my school days, “modern music” evoked names such as Béla Bartók and Aaron Copland. These days they have been “displaced” by Ligeti and Adams; and I, for one, cannot be happier with the changing contexts of the times.
Salonen followed “Tumblebird Contrails” with a performance of his own “Nyx.” In the absence of program notes, he addressed the audience with introductory content. It is also worth noting that he previously conducted this piece as a guest conductor with SFS in Davies in April of 2015. On that occasion, I noted that Nyx was one of the earliest of the deities in Greek mythology. However, Salonen observed that she was not necessarily a personification but, rather, the membrane that surrounded Chaos. This led Salonen to compose with thick textures that suggested the enigmatic nature of Nyx and her relation to Chaos. The intensity of his execution made this encounter with “Nyx” as exciting as the “first contact” had been.
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