Two Centuries of Russian Composers at Davies

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall German conductor David Afkham made his debut in leading the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). He presented a program based entirely on two Russian composers from the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The evening began with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35, his only violin concerto composed in the key of D major in 1878. The second half of the program was devoted to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 65, his eighth symphony in C minor, composed in 1943, a time during World War II when the Red Army was beginning to take the offensive over Nazi Germany.

The concerto soloist was Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan. As is often the case, Tchaikovsky’s score provided rich instrumentation for the ensemble; but, under Afkham’s leadership, the balance between Khachatryan and the ensemble could not have been better. However familiar this music may have been to most of the audience, last night’s performance made for both an engaging blend of sonorities and a “grand tour of dispositions,” which unfold over the course of the concerto’s three movements.

Less familiar, however, was Khachatryan’s approach to taking an encore. He performed an improvisation on music associated with the Armenian duduk. This is a double reed instrument, which is usually played in pairs. A melodic line unfolds against a steady drone, which, in this case, was provided by Associate Concertmaster Jason Issokson. I would not be surprised if this was “something completely different” for the entire audience; but it was an engaging listening experience, which received a generous round of applause.

Dmitri Shostakovich as fireman during the Second World War (from the “Fireman Shostakovich” article in the London Review of Books, January 2, 2016)

Given the context in which Shostakovich’s Opus 65 was composed, it is not surprising that this is one of his darkest compositions. Indeed, the Largo fourth movement, structured as a passacaglia, was clearly intended as a funeral march. While the music was clearly conceived by the composer as patriotic support, the darkness did not go down well with the Soviet authorities.

Things were not much better on this side of the pond. SFS did not perform this music until February of 1994, when it was conducted by Herbert Blomstedt. The most recent performance was conducted by Juraj Valčuha at the end of May of 2019. Afkham accounted for the many different shades of darkness; and, while the rhetoric was unrelenting, he clearly knew how to engage with the attentive listener. One may not have left Davies with an upbeat disposition, but one could still relish the memories of the listening experience. Nevertheless, the unrelenting intensity is such that encountering this music once in a decade should be enough.