SFS Serves Up a Forrest Gump Chocolate

Conductor Ryan Bancroft (photograph by Benjamin Ealovega, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony)

This afternoon Davies Symphony Hall saw the first of the three subscription concerts for this week performed by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Ryan Bancroft made his debut on the podium with support from the Shenson Young Artist Debut Fund. The soloist was the more seasoned violinist Joshua Bell,  but his second selection was being performed for the first time by SFS.

The above title invokes Forrest Gump because, in many ways, one of the chocolates in his box (where you do not know what you will be getting) could be taken as a metaphor for the entire program. That involved a generously robust shell of a rich dark chocolate, which accounted for the “outer extremes” of the program, Unsuk Chin’s “Alaraph ‘Ritus des Herzschlags’” at the beginning and Claude Debussy’s “La Mer” at the conclusion. The “filling” was then provided by the two selections that featured Bell on solo violin.

The title of Chin’s composition translates into “Alaraph: Rite of the Heartbeat.” The first word of the title is the name of a pulsating variable binary star. Chin’s program note explains that the varying brightness of this astronomical phenomenon tends to follow the same variation one observes in the trace of an echocardiogram, hence the relationship between the pulsating star and heartbeat.

Chin deployed a very large percussion section to realize this relationship in her score. She observed that she dispensed entirely with any of the pitched percussion instruments, devoting all of her focus on the interplay of polyrhythms. Those rhythms are then reinforced and developed through the other instruments in the ensemble, including a richly diverse array of winds and brass, as well as an accordion. A cynic might carp that this was music for “everything but the kitchen sink;” but Chin could not have done a better job in managing the full scope of her resources.

Because one good turn deserves another, Bancroft brought a thoroughly focused effort to his work on the podium. His attentiveness was enough to convince the listener that he had made it a point to attend to every note that made its mark on a score page. Thus, as the performance progressed, the attentive listener would gradually come to appreciate the role played by that synthesized relationship between pulsating star and heartbeat. As the score developed its coda, the listener could recognize the approach to the end of the journey; and this particular listener could relish that experience as if it were an encounter with that rich dark chocolate shell.

At the other end, the program concluded with “La Mer.” This takes us from astronomical phenomena to the ever-changing dispositions of the sea, beginning with the quietude of dawn and culminating with the massive waves that emerge through a “dialogue” between wind and water. It would not be out of the question to assume that Chin had applied meticulous study to Debussy’s score to develop her own mindset for dealing with both denotations and connotations of physical phenomena. Mind you, while Debussy’s approach to tonality is often fluid, Chin takes far more liberties with even the most basic concepts of a tonal center. What matters most, however, is familiarity; and far more listeners have contended with Debussy’s representative titles (“From Dawn Till Noon on the Sea,” “Play of the Waves,” “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea”) than have tried to associate Chin’s sonorities with astronomical phenomena. Nevertheless, under Bancroft’s baton, these two compositions emerged as a “matched set” of music associated with a shell of rich dark chocolate.

What was encountered within that shell, however, was another matter. Bell ruled over this domain, which began with Henri Vieuxtemps’ Opus 37, his fifth violin concerto composed in the key of A minor. This was then reflected across the intermission into Bell presenting the first SFS performance of “Earth,” composed by Kevin Puts in 2023. While these two compositions were more than a century and a half apart, they shared what can best be called a “mushy” quality that contrasted sharply with the metaphor of a shell. To be more specific, one came away from both of these selections feeling as if the composer had ambled his way from beginning to end with few attentions to any significant way-stations. Furthermore, from a purely personal point of view, neither of these pieces established an initial grip on my attention, let alone maintain it.

To go back to the Gump metaphor, the shell of the candy could not have been more inviting; but, when one broke through that shell, the filling was far too bitter to please the sensitive tongue!