Chan Gets Down to Business with SFS Concert

Now that conductor Elim Chan has been officially welcomed in City Hall at the end of last month, she has now gotten down to business with her first performance conducting the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) after she was officially named new Music Director of the ensemble. Some readers may recall that I was kind enough to describe her last performance on the SFS podium as a disappointment, but there was nothing disappointing about her return to the podium last night! Her selections spanned a little over half a century, and all three of them fired on all cylinders.

The “bookends” for the program could not have been more contrasting. Chan began with the Prelude for Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. This was, as is so often the case, coupled with an instrumental account of the opera’s final music, the “Liebestod.” The second half of the program, on the other hand, was devoted entirely to Claude Debussy’s three-movement tone poem “La Mer,” which has endured as many slings and arrows from the critics as Wagner did! The “concerto” of the program was a vocal selection sung by mezzo Sasha Cooke, a cycle setting six poems by Théophile Gautier given the title Le Nuits d’été (the nights of summer), composed by Hector Berlioz. As an encore, she sang “Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen” (I live my life in growing orbits), the second of the six songs that Michael Tilson Thomas collected for his cycle Meditations on Rilke. (Thomas’ recording of the complete cycle was released by SFS Media in July of 2020.)

Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” on the cover of the 1905 first edition of the score of “La Mer”

Much as I have consistently enjoyed Cooke’s performances, the high point of the evening was the chemistry Chan had established with the orchestra over the course of the entire evening. There is a plethora of instrumental details in “La Mer,” and Chan managed to provide a clear account of all of them. Debussy may not have captured the fractal details that one finds in the woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai entitled “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” For that matter, Pierre Lalo, critic for Le Temps, wrote “I do not hear, I do not see, I do not smell the sea.” Far be it from me to criticize the late Lalo for having tin ears; but, as far as I am concerned, he missed the point. Indeed, there are surges of sonorities in the final movement that might almost make you want to duck from an oncoming wave!

Chan’s approach to Wagner was as engaging has her reading of Debussy. While movement is the underlying force of “La Mer,” the music for Tristan was all about intense reflection. Over the course of the opera, the overall “path” is one of descent; so the performance of the music’s “bookends” comes across as a bit of a shortcut. Nevertheless, each of the two movements has its own approach to unfolding thematic material, over the course of which the listener establishes a “background” for the narrative of the opera. Chan’s account seemed to have that unfolding in mind, and the full resources of the SFS ensemble came across in following her lead with all the necessary precision.

All of these factors made last night a high point in the current SFS season.