It was somewhat less than a year ago that Karina Canellakis made her last visit to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). On that occasion her concerto soloist was Alexandre Kantorow in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 26 (third) piano concerto in C major. Yesterday evening Canellakis returned to Davies Symphony Hall to lead SFS in another Prokofiev concerto. This time the soloist was violinist Nicola Benedetti, playing Prokofiev’s Opus 83, his second violin concerto in G minor. “For the record,” as they say, my last account of her concerto work with SFS has been almost a decade. In March of 2017, she performed Max Bruch’s Opus 26 (first) violin concerto in G minor with then Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium.
Benedetti’s partnership with Canellakis could not have been better. This was, without a doubt, a “dynamite” account of the Prokofiev concerto. Each of the three movements had its own characteristic rhetorical stance, and Benedetti gave a clear and convincing account of each of those stances. Moreover, her relationship with the orchestra could not have been better. It was as if she was totally aware of every gesture in the orchestra score and complemented each of those gestures with her own rhetoric.
The Ashokan reservoir, which may have inspired Ungar’s music (photograph by Daniel Case, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, from Wikimedia Commons)
Audience reception demanded an encore, and Benedetti replied with American music that became familiar during the end of the last century. She gave a solo performance of Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell.” Those in the audience that recall the 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War would probably have felt a tinge of nostalgia. For my part, I could appreciate the music as a violin solo without any connotations of the Ghost of Television Past!
Prokofiev’s concerto was complemented, after the intermission, with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 45, given the title “Symphonic Dances.” While the middle of the three movements was clearly a waltz, there was little in the overall rhetoric to invoke any sense of a dance. On the other hand, there was more to enjoy in appreciating the rich instrumentation; and my vantage point provided an excellent view of all the activity in the percussion section! Opus 45 provided just the right opportunity for a full orchestral ensemble to “strut its stuff;” and, under Canellakis’ leadership, they certainly knew how to strut!
The “overture” for the program was “The Kingdom of Silence,” composed by Victoria Borisova-Ollas. This composer has as firm a command of instrumentation as Rachmaninoff did, but she never managed to apply it with the same skill. She seemed more interested in invoking “special effects” instead of establishing and exploring a rhetorical stance. Thus, while the performance lasted a bit less than a quarter of an hour, it felt like it went on forever. The instrumentation may have been ambitious, but this ambition required “sterner stuff.”
That said, Canellakis’ decision to present three unique Russian perspectives was definitely an interesting one, even if one of those perspectives did not live up to the standards of the other two!
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