San Francisco Opera Orchestra: Beethoven & Falla

Eun Sun Kim conducting the San Francisco Opera Orchestra (photography by Sasha Arutyunova, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)

Last night the stage of the War Memorial Opera House was turned over to the San Francisco Opera Orchestra for a concert performance. Eun Sun Kim conducted the ensemble with violinist Kay Stern as Concertmaster. The soloist for the program, entitled Beethoven 5 & Falla, was mezzo Daniela Mack. Those familiar with Ludwig van Beethoven would immediately see that Mack accounted for the Falla selection.

That selection was the familiar Siete canciones populares españolas, arrangements by Manuel de Falla of seven traditional Spanish songs. This was coupled with the second suite extracted from Falla’s score for the two-act ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, choreographed by Léonide Massine. As one can guess from the overall title, the second half of the program was devoted entirely to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 (fifth) symphony, composed in the key of C minor. Those familiar with Massine’s ballet know that, at a critical moment, Falla evokes the opening motif of the Beethoven symphony (far from the only dramatic incident to be accompanied by that music).

Since most of Kim’s time is spent in an orchestra pit, I relish opportunities to have a clearer view of her conducting style. Her approach to Beethoven could not have been better. Her command of the score was up there alongside just about every major conductor. Her chemistry with the ensemble could not have been better, allowing for the many subtleties in both phrasing and the scope of dynamic range. Opus 67 may be the most familiar work in the symphonic canon; but Kim brought both freshness and urgency to her interpretation, making the experience far from “just another Beethoven’s fifth” encounter.

Her command of Falla was just as engaging. The songs are relatively short, but Mack knew how to endow each of them with its own dimension of expressiveness. Falla’s approach to the vocal offerings could almost serve as a harbinger of Buckminster Fuller’s injunction that we should learn how to make more and more out of less and less. Somewhat in the spirit of haiku, each song has its own “target of reflection,” distilled into little more than a brief moment. Mack displayed a solid command of this rhetoric of brevity, and her engagement with the orchestra could not have been more compelling. Left to its own devices with the Three-Cornered Hat score, the ensemble captured the full scope of dramatic dispositions, one of which included a “sneak preview” of the music to come during the second half of the program.

As is usually the case with these events, I enjoyed the opportunity of a clearer vision of Kim’s approach to conducting; but what mattered most were the results, which could not have been more engaging!