Gershwin and Ravel Together Again

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the first of three performance of the final concert in the 2022–23 season. The program brought together two composers that had cultivated a rich friendship during the first quarter of the twentieth century. (The running joke has been that each had wanted to compose something the other had written.) Those composers were Maurice Ravel and George Gershwin.

Léon Bakst’s set design for the first part of Michel Fokine’s “Daphnis et Chloé” ballet (Houghton Library at Harvard University, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Ravel occupied the entire second half of last night’s program with a performance of the complete score that he had composed for a new ballet that Serge Diaghilev was planning for his Ballets Russes based on the myth of Daphnis and Chloé. The choreography by Michel Fokine has been pretty much forgotten; but Ravel’s music has endured, due, in at least some part, to his having extracted two suites from the full score. Last night Salonen conducted that score in its entirety, and the program notes by James M. Keller assisted those interested in following the narrative behind that music.

Ravel’s approach to instrumentation has always been a rich one. This one pretty much goes over the top with generous parts for the full sections of winds and brass, a rich abundance of percussion, two harps, celesta, and, as “icing on the cake,” a full chorus that vocalizes without singing any words. Salonen’s balancing of all of these resources was consistently absorbing, and the clarity of his phrasing was an asset for those following Fokine’s narrative. As one might expect, the entire ballet concludes with a “Danse générale,” a wild Bacchanal that Salonen deftly led to its explosive climax. Clearly, he wanted to make sure that the rich repertoire that had formed the entire season would go out with a bang.

Gershwin’s contribution to the program was decidedly more modest but no less engaging. Soprano Julia Bullock sang the familiar “Summertime,” which begins the Porgy and Bess opera. However, that selection was flanked on either side by a pair of songs that Nelson Riddle arranged for Ella Fitzgerald. The first of these was “Somebody from Somewhere” from the 1931 musical Delicious; and the final selection was “Soon.”

Between these pieces were two compositions by Margaret Bonds, both settings of texts by Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Winter Moon,” the latter from the Songs of the Seasons cycle. Both of these selections were given orchestral arrangements by Jannina Norpoth. All four of these songs were being given their first SFS performances. Finally, Bullock took an encore, singing “Somewhere” from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, which she had previously sung when Michael Tilson Thomas had conducted the full score with SFS almost exactly ten years ago.

The program began with another premiere, the world premiere, in fact, of Reena Esmail’s revised version of her tone poem “Black Iris.” Like the Ravel selection that concluded the program, this tone poem drew upon rich instrumentation, this time to reflect on the horrors of sexual abuse. Her own notes for the program book cited the rage that occupied her while writing the music. Nevertheless, she is a disciplined enough composer that she did not allow her music to devolve into a mere rant. Indeed, she took her title from the elaborate detail in a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe; and I was particularly impressed in the ways in which her approach to detail served as a key to her compelling account of such an intensely disquieting context.