More Debut Performances by Cristian Mӑcelaru

When Romanian conductor Cristian Mӑcelaru made his debut on the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in October of 2018, the program he prepared featured two debut performances. Last night he returned to Davies Symphony Hall with another program of two premieres. The more important of these was definitely the cor anglais (English horn) concerto composed by Outi Tarkiainen, which had been written on an SFS commission to feature its cor anglais player, Russ de Luna.

Outi Tarkiainen (from the Uniarts Helsinki Web page about “Milky Ways”)

Tarkiainen gave the concerto the title “Milky Ways,” reflecting both on childbirth and the Milky Way galaxy, which is easily seen in the night sky over Lapland, the northernmost region of Finland where Tarkiainen lives. The music was given its premiere by the Finnish Radio Symphony last month. The soloist was Nicholas Daniel, and Nicholas Collon conducted the Finnish Radio Symphony. Last night SFS presented the concerto’s United States premiere.

The composer was present for the occasion, engaging in a pre-concert conversation with Tim Higgins, the SFS Principal Trombone and providing a brief introduction to the entire audience before the performance itself. Beyond the hauntingly engaging solo part, the concerto was scored for a large ensemble with rich sonorities emerging from every section. There was also a significant spatial element, which included de Luna moving to the rear of the stage, behind the brass performers, and a few members of the string section at the end of the “odd number” arm of the 1st Tier. In spite of this abundance of resources, one could appreciate the understated rhetoric and more than a hint of the loneliness of isolation in de Luna’s expressive account of his solo work.

After the intermission the program concluded with the symphony selection, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 10 (first) symphony in F minor. The subtleties of Tarkiainen’s concerto were sharply contrasted by Shostakovich’s raucous rhetoric. The symphony was composed in 1925 when Joseph Stalin was just beginning to consolidate the power of his leadership of the Soviet Union. It would be a decade before Shostakovich would get in trouble for his prankishness, and the Opus 10 symphony practically works its way through a laundry list of outrageous gestures. Mӑcelaru made sure that every one of those gestures resonated with the attentive listener, and the outrageousness of the composer’s rhetorical extremes provided just the right contrast to the melancholy stillness of Tarkiainen’s concerto.

The only real disappointment of the evening was the “overture.” This consisted of two movements (“Reconstruction Rag” and “Big City Breaks”) from a suite by Wynton Marsalis, which he entitled Blues Symphony. The first of those two movements got off to a promising start as a “waltz that isn’t a waltz.” However, once the rag itself kicked in, the music came across as an overabundance of busy work. The program note by Sean Colonna described “Big City Breaks” as “percussion-heavy bebop;” but the rhetoric came across more in the spirit of Thelonious Monk’s departure from bebop tradition. The Marsalis quote in that program note left the impression that he was trying to do too many things at once, and there was little in the performance itself that left me curious about the composition’s other five movements.

Far more promising is the possibility that more of Tarkiainen’s music will find its way into the SFS repertoire.