Bronfman Returns to SFS Great Performers

Pianist Yefim Bronfman (from the Web page for his SFS Great Performers Series recital)

Last night pianist Yefim Bronfman returned to Davies Symphony Hall to present another recital in the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Great Performers Series. His last visit was in April of 2024, when he presented a “usual suspects” program of solo piano compositions by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Frédéric Chopin. However, he also added Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Sisar” for a departure from the nineteenth century.

Last night’s departure was far less radical. The most recent work on the program was the second of the two “books” that Claude Debussy composed under the title Images. There are only three pieces in this collection, the first depicting the sound of bells, the second evoking the setting of the moon, and the last entitled simple “Poissons d’or” (goldfish). Each of these pieces presents the composer’s command of the evocative at its best. Sadly, while Bronfman gave a dutiful account of all the notes, any of the evocations of the “images” in the movement titles was not particularly compelling. That failure to seize and maintain attentive listening was equally evident at the beginning of the program with a performance of Robert Schumann’s Opus 18, the “Arabesque” in C major, which rambled on with an uneven sense of the overall structure.

Each half of the program concluded with a sonata by one of the “three B’s,” Johannes Brahms prior to the intermission and Ludwig van Beethoven at the conclusion. The Brahms selection was an early one, his Opus 5, the third piano sonata in F minor. There was no shortage of expressiveness in the composer’s early compositions, but Bronfman seemed to do little more than ramp up that expressiveness with little sense of the overall content. The dynamics in the first movement were particularly extreme. The Beethoven selection was about half a century earlier (not in 1853 as printed in the program book). Opus 57, known as the “Appassionata,” was completed in 1805; and, like its recent predecessor, the Opus 53 “Waldstein,” it has received a generous amount of attention. Sadly, Bronfman did not invoke the attention it deserved with too much “hammering” in the first movement and too much blurring in the last.

There were two encores, neither announced and neither particularly compelling. I have come away from past Bronfman recitals with an abundance of satisfaction. This one left me with disappointment.