Măcelaru Leads an Uneven Evening at Davies

Cristian Măcelaru, this week’s SFS conductor (from the Web page for this concert)

Last night Cristian Măcelaru returned to the podium in Davies Symphony Hall to lead the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the first of this week’s three concert performances. The program was given a straightforward overture-concerto-symphony structure, with the “overture” being a world premiere performance. “Embers” was only recently completed, composed by Tyler Taylor on an SFS commission. This was followed by Sergei Rachmaninoff’s first piano concerto, which was also his Opus 1, composed in the key of F-sharp minor with Simon Trpčeski as the piano soloist. The program concluded with Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 95, his ninth and final symphony, best known for its title, “From the New World.”

The symphony was the most familiar work on the program, but it was also given the most convincing performance. Each of the four movements provides a different perspective of the composer’s impressions of his visit to the United States. His “guide” for the symphony was the black Pennsylvanian composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh, who studied under Dvořák at the National Conservatory. It was probably through Burleigh that he came to know the music for “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which finds its way into the symphony’s first movement. Turnaround is, of course, fair play; and the principal theme from the Largo movement of Opus 95 became the popular song “Goin’ Home.” That theme returns in the symphony’s final movement. It would be fair to say that Măcelaru had a solid command of this symphony’s “American spirit,” and that command brought a freshness to music that was probably familiar to many (if not most) in the audience.

Taken as a whole, the symphony provided well-needed relief from the sledge-hammer rhetoric of Rachmaninoff’s concerto. I also found that the concerto’s concluding Allegro vivace reminded me of the old joke about the cowboy who gets on his horse hand rides off wildly in all directions. Trpčeski did not announce his encore, which I could only describe as “violent vivace,” possibly a product of Sergei Prokofiev. Assistant Concertmaster Wyatt Underhill then joined Trpčeski for a duo performance of music that was not identified.

The commission for “Embers” was part of the Emerging Black Composers Project. Taylor “pulled out all the stops” in his composition efforts, writing for a full complement of winds (including alto flute, contrabassoon, and tenor saxophone) and just about every percussion instrument one could imagine. In many respects, the music was a journey through along a path of a rich diversity of sonorities; and the quarter-hour duration of the composition provided just that right amount of time to make that journey an engaging one. Taylor himself introduced the performance. Like the music, his introduction was neither too long nor too short.