Rafael Payare leading the Orchestra Symphonique de Montréal (from the SFS Web page for this event)
Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Great Performers Series hosted a visit in Davies Symphony Hall from the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, led by its Music Director and Artistic Director Rafael Payare. The program consisted of only two compositions, a concerto in the first half and a symphony in the second. Both of these were by Russian composers from two successive centuries.
The program began with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35, his only violin concerto, composed in the key of D major. The soloist was Leonidas Kavakos, who last visited Davies a little over a year ago to perform Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto with Jun Märkl on the podium. According to my records, this is the second time this year that the symphony selection was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 93 (tenth) symphony in E minor (the first have taken place this past January in a performance by the SFS Youth Orchestra). Kavakos also performed a solo encore prior to the intermission, the Gavotte en Rondeau movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1006 solo violin partita in E major.
According to my archives, Payare last visited Davies in May of 2023, when he was a guest conductor. He will return to the SFS podium this coming June. He is a very physical conductor, but I would not accuse him of overplaying his hand. The Shostakovich symphony displays a significantly rich instrumentation, including the full resources of the percussion and a seldom-heard solo passage for contrabassoon. The Tchaikovsky concerto, on the other hand, was more familiar; but Payare established his own point of view to make sure that such a familiar offering was not given a “business as usual” treatment! Taken as a whole, the visitors from Montréal provided San Francisco music lovers with an afternoon well spent!
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