Violinist Leonidas Kavakos (from the SFS event page for last night’s performances)
Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the first subscription concert for the 2023–24 season. The program followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony format. The concerto soloist was Leonidas Kavakos performing Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 violin concerto in D major.
Kavakos is no stranger to Davies, but this was his first performance since the pandemic. His most recent appearance was as a recital soloist in the SFS Great Performers Series in January of 2019; but, at the beginning of that season, he performed Igor Stravinsky’s 1931 violin concerto in D with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. I suspect that many (if not most) of the audience know the Tchaikovsky concerto so well that they can reproduce it in their sleep. Nevertheless, there was an energetic freshness to Kavakos’ approach to Tchaikovsky, which was more than adequately shared by Salonen’s leadership. As a result, regardless of familiarity, there were any number of edge-of-your-seat moments in Kavakos’ virtuosity, particularly in his interpretation of the well-known cadenza that is usually performed towards the end of the first movement.
As might be expected, the account of the first movement was exciting enough to elicit a rousing burst of applause from the audience. When it seemed evident that they would not stop, Salonen tried all sorts of mime techniques to remind them that the concerto still had two movements remaining! It goes without saying that the applause following the final movement was just as vigorous as the first round. When it was clear that the audience demanded more from Kavakos, he finally offered a solo encore. He selected the Sarabande movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo partita in D minor, making the clear case that he was just as sensitive to quietude as he was agile in jumping through all of Tchaikovsky’s hoops.
The downside is that Kavakos’ appearance made for the only satisfying account of the evening. The “overture” selection was the West Coast premiere of “Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!,” composed by Wynton Marsalis in 2022. Early in his career, Marsalis released albums of both classical and jazz. At that time, I remember listening on the radio to an interview with conductor Raymond Leppard, who asserted rather strongly that Marsalis would have to choose between the two genres if he is to achieve the best of his abilities.
We now know that Marsalis disregarded Leppard’s cautionary remarks. One result is that last night’s opening selection never made much of a mark, whether it involved the “roots” rhetoric of the thematic material or the arrangement of those “roots” for fifteen brass players and (as Peter Schickele liked to put it) “an awful lot of percussion.” Mind you, it was clear that all of the SFS instrumentalists were having a grand old time by “letting it all hang out” (as my generation used to say). However, there was little about the music itself to prompt sustained attention. Since the piece was only five minutes in duration, that disadvantage did not signify very much or for very long.
Would that the same could be said of the symphony offering that followed the intermission! The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Richard Strauss’ Opus 64, “An Alpine Symphony.” Composed in 1915, this is one of his later tone poems, composed not long after his success with the Opus 59 opera Der Rosenkavalier. Those familiar with that opera know that, while the plot unfolds over three acts, the action flies by like lightning.
Sadly, this was not the case for Opus 64. The tone poem was structured around a single day involving ascending and descending an alpine trail. This consists of twenty episodes, all of which were meticulously enumerated in the notes for the program book by the late Michael Steinberg. (The program note concludes with the sentence “This note has been edited for length.”) Even with Salonen’s attentiveness to the many details in the score, last night’s performance could not get beyond coming off as a rather tedious (if well-intentioned) slog. True, everyone up on stage had a turn in the spotlight (along with an organist that seemed to have been situated off-stage). However, when placed alongside the more familiar Strauss tone poems, Opus 64 seems to have little to say to seize and sustain attention.
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