Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen led the penultimate program in his tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). The program was framed by the two best-known tone poems by Richard Strauss, beginning with “Don Juan” (Opus 20) and concluding with “Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks” (Opus 28). Opus 20 was followed by Jean Sibelius’ final symphony, Opus 105 (the seventh), a single-movement composition in the key of C major. The second half of the program began with “Rewilding” by Gabriella Smith, composed on an SFS commission.
Taken as a whole, the occasion provided the perfect opportunity to appreciate Salonen’s mastery of detail and his chemistry with the ensemble. The two Strauss works, both composed late in the nineteenth century, have sustained their war horse reputation well over a century later. Both of them exploit the affordances of a large symphonic ensemble. Salonen clearly appreciated all of those affordances and guided the entire SFS ensemble in such a way that any attentive listener could appreciate them just as readily.
The Sibelius symphony, on the other hand, is seldom encountered, perhaps because the uninterrupted flow of his five movements is unabashedly enigmatic, even though the key signature is C major. My last account of this music involved the first recording of the work ever made, which was by Serge Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1939. The last time Salonen conducted the work in California was during his tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last night he knew how to make every note count, and every member of the ensemble was there with him to make sure that even the subtlest of gestures would be within the “auditory grasp” of anyone prepared to listen.
Sadly, the weakest offering was also the most recent. Smith had previously composed “Tumblebird Contrails” in 2014. It was selected for the Nobel Prize Concert in 2023, when Salonen conducted it with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. It was then performed by SFS later that year, following up on a performance by the SFS Youth Orchestra in March of 2022. I was fortunate enough to attend that performance and wrote the following:
Smith’s “Tumblebird Contrails” was a reflection on the diverse environments that the composer encountered while backpacking in Point Reyes. The attentive listener could either follow those environments by reading Smith’s program note or just let his/her/their imagination run its course through past personal experiences. Either way, it was not difficult to appreciate Smith’s ability to turn those environmental impressions into instrumental themes and textures, but she exhausted her vocabulary and her capacity for elaboration roughly halfway through the duration of the score.
Were I to substitute “Rewilding” for “Tumblebird Contrails” in the above text, the message would remain the same.
Cover design for Littoral (from the Recordings Web page on Cheryl E. Leonard’s Web site)
A little less than a year ago, I was fortunate enough to encounter composer Cheryl E. Leonard presenting a program entitled Antarctica: Music from the Ice at the Golden Gate Valley Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Leonard had an uncanny knack for taking field recordings and turning them into music, and I took great pleasure writing an article about two of her albums. Little did I know how high the bar had been set in the genre of creating music inspired by natural sounds. Sadly, that bar was too high for Smith to mount, at least on the basis of her approach to “Tumblebird Contrails.”
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