John Storgårds’ Engaging SFS Podium Debut

John Storgårds, this week’s SFS conductor (from the SFS Web page for the concert program)

Last night saw Finnish conductor John Storgårds make his debut on the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). He prepared a “standard” overture-concerto-symphony program, using the “overture” to introduce a Finnish composition to the audience. “The Rapids of Life” was composed by Outi Tarkiainen in 2023, and last night’s performance saw its United State premiere.

In the program book, Tarkiainen described her composition as “a work about that paramount moment, about a female’s instinctive birth-giving and a little child of nature who opens his eyes for the first time.” I must confess that my attention to this context was almost ferociously overshadowed by a massive and engagingly diverse percussion section, consisting of a pair of cymbals crashing each other, a suspended cymbal, gong, tam-tam, glass wind chimes, shell chimes, egg shakers, ratchet, bass drum, glockenspiel, bowed vibraphone, and tubular bells. While I could appreciate the intentions behind the composer’s context, it was hard for me to avoid anything other than the deft choreography of the percussionists at their work.

The remaining two works on the program were both in the key of C minor, but they could not have been more different. The intermission was preceded by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 35, his first piano concerto given the title “Concerto for piano, trumpet and string orchestra.” The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 (fifth) symphony.

This made for an engaging “compare and contrast” experience. The Shostakovich concerto was first performed in 1933, a time when Joseph Stalin had his hands full with a famine and had not yet begun to interfere with the performing arts. The instrumentation itself suggests a witty rhetoric, and Mark Inouye made every one of Shostakovich’s gestures for the trumpet an engaging one. The solo piano was performed by Seong-Jin Cho, serving up the perfect counterpart to Inouye’s rhetoric. The two of them performed a duo encore after the concerto, but no title was announced.

Shostakovich’s wit provided just the right contrast to the Beethoven symphony, which can be counted as the ultimate “scowling Beethoven” composition. If this is not the most familiar piece of music in the classical repertoire, it is certainly in the “top ten,” if not the “top five.” Indeed, it is so popular that the opening gesture runs the risk of an overused cliché. Fortunately, Storgårds was more interested in the overall framework of the symphony than in its most familiar motif. Thus, while much (most?) of the audience was well acquainted with the full panoply of themes in the Opus 67 symphony, Storgårds’ interpretation made for a freshly engaging encounter with “the old warhorse.”

Taken as a whole, Storgårds’ performance was engaging from start to finish; perhaps he will return soon with a program that couples a Beethoven piano concerto with a Shostakovich symphony!