Gardner Returns to SFS with English Offerings

Conductor Edward Gardner (photograph by Benjamin Ealovega, courtesy of SFS)

Conductor Edward Gardner made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in March of 2018. I described that program as “Anglo-American,” since he coupled instrumental excerpts from Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage with George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Last night Gardner returned to Davies Symphony Hall, this time with a stronger emphasis on the “Anglo” side.

He began the program with the overture from incidental music that Ralph Vaughan William had composed for a performance of Aristophanes’ play The Wasps in 1909. The final selection was composed less than a decade later, Gustav Holst’s Opus 32 suite, The Planets. The concerto soloist was violinist Randall Goosby, who departed from British traditions with a performance of Max Bruch’s Opus 26 (first) violin concerto. He then selected an American encore, “Louisiana Blues Strut: A Cakewalk,” composed for solo violin by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. Bruch was thus the “outlier” in another Anglo-American offering.

Mind you, there was nothing “secondary” about Goosby’s approach to the concerto. This has become a warhorse for both violinists and those seeking out violin performances. Nevertheless, Goosby gave a throughly engaging account, bringing freshness to the familiar; and his chemistry with Gardner’s leadership could not have been better. Of course his encore was the same one he had performed when he made his SFS debut with Esa-Pekka Salonen in September of 2022, but I enjoyed the music as much as I did on “first contact.”

Both of the British selections were products of richly imaginative approaches to instrumentation. It is therefore significant that Gardner consistently maintained a solid command of instrumental balance, which was probably the key asset in his chemistry with the ensemble. Holst’s suite is particularly challenging when it comes to endowing each of the movements of the seven planets with its own distinctive approach to tempo. This brings the necessary sense of flow to Opus 32, without which the attentive listener is besieged by little more than “one thing after another.” Similarly, at the more “microscopic” level, Gardner knew exactly how to make each phrase count, endowing each planet with its own identity, as well as the Aristophanic identity of Vaughan Williams’ overture.