SFS: After Half a Decade Slobodeniouk Returns

Conductor Dima Slobodeniouk (2016 photograph by Elisardojm, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Last night Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk returned to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in Davies Symphony, having made his debut here in January of 2020. He studied both violin and conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, where his teachers included Leif Segerstam, Jorma Panula and Atso Almila. As might be expected, his debut program included Jean Sibelius’ Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor with Armenian virtuoso Sergey Khachatryan as soloist. His symphony selection was a familiar warhorse, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 92 (seventh) in A major. However, his overture was more adventurous, the SF premiere of Jörg Widmann’s “Con brio,” whose title reflected the final movement of Beethoven’s Opus 92.

This week’s program devoted the first half to French composers and the second to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with a performance of his Opus 36 (fourth) symphony in F minor. The concerto (which, as usual, preceded the intermission) was the flute concerto that Jacques Ibert composed in 1934 with SFS Principal Flute Yubeen Kim as soloist. The overture was composed 30 years later by another Frenchman, Henri Dutilleux. “Métaboles.” This amounted to a musical study of metamorphosis, which is deployed for melodic content, harmonies, and rhythms, the latter involving a generous and diverse collection of instruments in the percussion section.

I have to confess that, while that first half was impressively diverse, I find that my “morning after” recollections were not particularly vivid. There were more than enough challenges in Ibert’s concerto to keep Kim on his toes, but he delivered a solid and convincing account of the three-movement concerto. Taken as a whole, it was a dazzling display of virtuosity, given free rein in Ibert’s thematic material. After jumping through the composer’s many hoops, Kim then settled back to provide the audience with an encore solo performance of Claude Debussy’s “Syrinx.” While both of the French compositions in the first half of the program were engaging, Kim’s performance of “Syrinx,” for all its brevity, was the selection that seized and sustained attention from beginning to end.

In the second half of the program, Slobodeniouk’s virtue was his ability not to overplay his hand. Opus 36 is the “Fate” symphony with a dark theme that overshadows the entire composition. However, as is often the case, what is most important is the diversity of instrumental combinations that Tchaikovsky deployed. The overall rhetoric may be a bit too much on the heart-on-sleeve side; but the journey through all of those sonorities always seems to make the listening experience an engaging one. However familiar the music was to many (most?) in the audience, Slobodeniouk’s interpretation elicited no end of perspectives more than worthy of attention.