Engaging Mahler From SFS Youth Orchestra

The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall (from the Web page for yesterday’s performance)

Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Youth Orchestra presented the fourth of the five programs prepared for this season. The second half of the program was particularly ambitious, devoted entirely to Gustav Maher’s fourth symphony, composed in the key of G major. In many ways this may be his most “affable” symphony, with each of the four movements having its own upbeat rhetoric. The last of these brings in a soprano, singing a text from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn extolling the virtues of “the heavenly life.”

Conductor Radu Paponiu had clearly internalized the durational scope of each of the four movements, each of which has its own story to tell. Unfortunately, in the final movement Hannah Cho’s soprano voice was too weak to hold its own against Mahler’s rich instrumentation. Mind you, Mahler himself had scaled back his resources to accommodate the soprano line. However, Cho could not rise above the ensemble to say her piece. Whether this was a problem with her own vocal strength or Paponiu’s control of dynamic levels must be left as a choice to be made by the attentive listener!

The intensity of Mahler’s symphony was balanced at the beginning of the program by Jean Sibelius’ best-known tone poem, “Finlandia.” The relationship between conductor and ensemble could not have been better. The music is a panorama of changing dispositions, and Paponiu knew who to evoke each of the moods from his attentive ensemble. Jennifer Higdon’s “blue cathedral” tone poem had its own panorama, with an opening progression recalling Aaron Copland’s rhetoric. Nevertheless, it had little to offer the attentive listener other than its overall brevity.

Taken as a whole, the program fared well through the chemistry of Paponiu’s engagement with his ensemble, making the afternoon another engaging encounter with the “next generation” of orchestral musicians.

November will Begin with a Hard Choice

Those particularly interested in art song will find themselves facing a bit of a predicament at the beginning of next month. Three concerts will be taking place at 7:30 p.m. on November 1. One of them will mark the beginning of the season for the New Century Chamber Orchestra with the Vivaldi: Recomposed program announced this past July. Of the other two, one will feature a mezzo and the other a soprano. Both involve significant repertoire that, as far as I am concerned, deserves more attention than recorded performances can offer.

San Francisco Opera Music Director Eun Sun Kim (courtesy of San Francisco Opera)

The first of those two concerts will be performed by the San Francisco Opera Orchestra led by its Music Director Eun Sun Kim. The vocalist will be mezzo Daniela Mack singing the Siete canciones populares españolas (seven Spanish folksongs), composed by Manuel de Falla originally soprano and piano. This music has been orchestrated at least twice; and, most likely, Kim will conduct the orchestration by Falla’s student, Ernesto Halffter. This will be coupled with the three dances included in the second suite that Falla extracted from his score for the two-act ballet The Three-Cornered Hat (El sombrero de tres picos). Following the intermission, the Orchestra will play Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 (fifth) symphony in C minor.

Ticket prices for this special event range from $29 to $250. All tickets may be purchased in the outer lobby of the venue for the performance, the War Memorial Opera House at 301 Van Ness Avenue or by calling the Box Office at 415-864-3330. Box Office hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. on Monday and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday. In addition, a Web page has been created for online purchases.

The second concert will mark the beginning of the season for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. They will be joined by soprano Nikki Einfeld, who will perform a chamber music arrangement of Gustav Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, settings of five poems by Friedrich Rückert. The program will conclude with the winner of the 2024 Composition Contest, “Sillage,” composed by Artur Akshelyan. This will be preceded by Fanny Mendelssohn’s Opus 11, her piano trio in D minor, which will feature pianist Allegra Chapman. The program will begin with Roberto Sierra’s “Tríptico.”

Ticket prices range from $5 to $40. There will also be a facility fee of either two or three dollars, depending on the location of the seats. The Web page for online purchases includes a free “Print at Home” option. The performance will take place at the Noe Valley Ministry, which is at 1021 Sanchez Street.

Donald Runnicles Brings Mahler and Berg to SFS

I returned to the United States, after living in Singapore for about five years, to work in the new Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory on the northern edge of Silicon Valley. Unless I am mistaken, I purchased San Francisco Opera subscription tickets for my wife and I even before we left Singapore. We arrived in time for the beginning of the season in September of 1995, and we have been subscribers ever since then.

Readers probably know by now that, when I go to the War Memorial Opera House, I am as involved with what is happening in the orchestra pit as with what is happening on stage. As a result, it did not take me long to become acquainted with Donald Runnicles’ conducting technique; and I became more and more interested in his work the more I encountered it. Runnicles left his position at the San Francisco Opera in 2008, but he has made return visits since then. I have tried to keep up with them, and the most recent is currently taking place in Davies Symphony Hall.

For his visit to the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) this week, Runnicles prepared a program with Alban Berg in the first half and Gustav Mahler in the second. Both of the works represented the composers at the beginning of their respective careers. The earlier of these was Mahler’s first symphony in D major, composed in 1888 and revised in 1906. The first half of the program was devoted to Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs, composed for piano and voice in 1908 and orchestrated in 1928. The vocalist for the performances was mezzo Irene Roberts.

Berg’s approach to orchestration was as rich as Mahler’s and decidedly more adventurous. The second of the songs was scored only for string quartet, harp, and bass, while instrumentation for the fifth song involved only winds. Since Runnicles is no stranger to vocalists, he knew exactly how to balance Roberts’ voice against the rich palette of sonorities in Berg’s score.

The songs themselves were originally composed for piano accompaniment when Berg was studying under Arnold Schoenberg in 1905. They were not orchestrated until after Berg had developed his own techniques for vocal composition in his Wozzeck opera. With those techniques under his belt, so to speak, he could find just the right instrumental coloration for each of the seven songs. Runnicles knew exactly how to elicit all of those colors from the SFS ensemble, always blending perfectly with the vast scope of dispositions in Roberts’ delivery of the texts.

Photograph of Gustav Mahler by Leonard Berlin (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

I found it interesting that the revised version of Mahler’s symphony should predate Berg’s undertaking by so few years. What makes this pairing interesting is that both compositions have prodigious rhetorical breadth. In Mahler’s case, however, it feels as if the rhetoric swings from one extreme to another. Furthermore, regardless of what any individual disposition may be, there is always a recognizable undercurrent of irony. Runnicles knew how to keep that undercurrent flowing, whether it involved a funeral march in a warped version of “Frére Jacques” or the thunder and lightning in the final (“Stürmisch”) movement.

Taken as a whole, this was a program that kept the conductor busy from beginning to end. It also called for expressiveness with operatic roots. (Remember, Mahler was Director of the Vienna Court Opera when he was working on his first symphony.) Who better to allow those roots to flourish in the concert hall than a conductor (like Mahler) with experience in performing opera? It may be early in the season, but I suspect that Runnicles’ visit will remain a memorable one.

SFS: September 2025 After the Festivities

Having accounted for the launch of the new San Francisco Symphony (SFS) season a little less than two months ago, it is now time to report on the two Orchestral Series programs that will be performed during the remainder of the month of September. As usual, each of the dates will be provided with a hyperlink to facilitate ticket purchases. Tickets may also be purchased at the Davies Symphony Hall Box Office, which is at the entrance on the south side of Grove Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street.

Thursday, September 18, Friday, September 19, Saturday, September 20, 7:30 p.m.: James Gaffigan will conduct a program that will feature three composers influenced by Harlem. In fact, the final work on the program will be Duke Ellington’s orchestral suite “Harlem,” which was originally commissioned by Arturo Toscanini (who never conducted it). Pianist Hélène Grimaud will be the soloist in two of George Gershwin’s best-known works for piano and orchestra, his Concerto in F, which he composed after the success of “Rhapsody in Blue.” The program will begin with Carlos Simon’s “The Block,” whose Harlem influence was inspired by the works of African-American Romare Bearden, who was both a painter and a songwriter.

Conductor Donald Runnicles (from the SFS Web page for the concert he will lead)

Friday, September 26, and Saturday, September 27, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, September 28, 2 p.m.: Donald Runnicles has prepared a program that will pair early works by Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler. Indeed, the title of the first offering is Seven Early Songs. Berg composed these during his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. The Wikipedia page for this composition suggests that Berg had a generous number of other influences beyond Schoenberg himself. These include Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Richard Wagner, and Mahler himself. The vocalist will be mezzo Irene Roberts. The second half of the program will be devoted entirely to Gustav Mahler’s first symphony in D major.

Salonen Concludes Tenure with Mahler

“Poster design” for the SFS Web page for this week’s performance, suggesting the challenges in both conducting and listening to Mahler’s music

This week marks the conclusion of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). For his final selection, he presented Gustav Mahler’s second (“Resurrection”) symphony in C minor. This required the full forces of the orchestral ensemble with the final movement bringing in the SFS Chorus, prepared by its Director Jenny Wong, as well as vocal solo performances by soprano Heidi Stober and mezzo Sasha Cooke.

Salonen’s command of these resources and the full extent of detail in the composer’s score could not have been better. Mahler’s rhetorical “sweet spot” is one of intense climaxes, usually approached along a gradual path of accumulating force. Mind you, it is often the case that, when Mahler encounters an episode with its own self-contained narrative, he has no trouble repeating himself. Nevertheless, Salonen clearly knew how to shape the full scope of the symphony’s five movements to avoid any here-we-go-again moments.

For the most part the music is dominated by the instrumental resources. The symphony is in five movements, but the first three are entirely instrumental. The fourth brings in the mezzo for the first time, in setting of the “Urlicht” (primal light) verses from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn anthology of folk poetry. Even in the final movement, the first half is instrumental, bringing the chorus and solo vocalists in only for the second half. (Indeed, the beginning of the second half is marked by a cappella singing by the chorus.)

Mind you, a viable metaphor for this symphony would be a collection of islets in a vast ocean, all of which are volcanos. Each has its own capacity for eruption, and one never knows which one will let loose at what time. To be fair, Mahler is a bit more forgiving. He has extended passages with piano dynamics and solo instrumental passages that lay out the geography of the ocean, so to speak. However, in the midst of this tranquility, there are the eruptions, some of which explode spontaneously, while others result from a gradual mounting of energy. In other words, Mahler has done his level best to seize the attention of the listener from the very beginning and maintain that attention until the final roaring instrumental cadence.

Salonen clearly knew how to “go out with a bang,” and he will be missed.

SOMM to Release Tribute to Fischer-Dieskau

While I had recognized the name of baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau through my regular perusals of the Schwann catalog of recordings, my “first contact” with listening to his voice came about when I added Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem to my collection. The libretto incorporated poems written by Wilfred Owen during World War I; and Fischer-Dieskau took the “role” of a German soldier, complemented by tenor Peter Pears representing an English soldier. Fischer-Dieskau had more than a few problems with English pronunciation; but none of them interfered with the expressiveness of his delivery, whether it involved the intensity of battle or the poignant setting in the final movement of “Let us sleep now,” sung in duo with Pears.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the cover of the “tribute” album about to be released (from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording)

However, my account of Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings has been relatively modest, particular in light of the eleven-CD box set of the recordings he made for EMI. This Friday, SOMM Recordings will release a two-CD album entitled Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: A Centenary Tribute; and, as is usually the case, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. The second CD is devoted entirely to two interviews, the first for his 75th birthday in 2000 and the second for his 80th birthday in 2005. The first CD offers an engaging interleaving of familiar vocal works among the less familiar.

All of the familiar offerings are by Gustav Mahler, with three songs from Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit coupled with three of the Rückert-Lieder songs. These are all recital recordings with pianist Karl Engel accompanying Fischer-Dieskau. There are also five tracks of settings by Ferruccio Busoni of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as also single settings of Goethe by Richard Strauss and Max Reger. The less familiar composers in the repertoire are Anna Amalia, Johann Friedrich Reichart, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. The album then concludes with three songs in Hungarian, two by Zoltán Kodály and one a folk song.

I have to confess that one of the reasons that drew me to this album is my interest in the Busoni catalog. I am almost certain that this was my first encounter with his approach to art song, and Fischer-Dieskau could not have been a better advocate. It is also worth noting that the Kodály tracks provided accompaniment by the London Symphony Orchestra with Kodály himself on the podium. Thus, as “centenary tributes” go, the “historical content” of this album is decidedly impressive. My guess is that Busoni and Kodály will be the primary factors in drawing me back to this album for further listening!

SFO Orchestra: First Community Concert

At the end of last week, this site announced the plans of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Orchestra to presented free community concerts. The first of those events was given last night at the Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch. The performers included two different string quartets, three wind players, and a concluding ensemble of four violins and bass. Two of the selections involved vocal music in which the wind players took the vocal parts.

The program began with “Crisantemi” (chrysanthemums), which is probably Giacomo Puccini’s best-known instrumental composition. It was performed by the string quartet of violinists Jennifer Hsieh and Naoko Nakajima, Lindan Burns on viola, and cellist Rachel Ko. It was conceived as a memorial work for King Amadeo I of Spain, and the thematic material would subsequently find its was into Puccini’s Manon Lescaut opera. The players perfectly captured Puccini’s rhetoric of stillness, readily seizing the attention of the audience that surrounded them on all sides.

This was followed by Gustav Mahler’s song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (songs of a wayfarer). The quartet players were joined by Benjamin Brogadir on Cor anglais (English horn) performing the vocal line. The quintet presented an arrangement by Cliff Colnot and Stefan Hersh. This music was probably familiar to many of the listeners, at least some of whom could probably hear the words of the text (by Mahler himself) behind Brogadir’s solo work. The performance may not have had the no-holds-barred intensity of the composer’s score, but it still provided an absorbing account of a highly expressive narrative.

The quartet then accompanied the duo of flutist Stephanie McNab and Gabriel Young on oboe. This time the words transformed into instrumental music came from the text of the “Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ opera Lakmé. The vocalists in the opera were a soprano and mezzo, and arranger Carrie Weick definitely made the right choice of instruments for those voices. It would probably be fair to say that most listeners know more about this music than about the words being sung, and such listeners would have been more than satisfied with this particular sextet arrangement.

Alberto Ginastera (photograph by Annemarie Heinrich, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

McNab and Young then departed from the vocal repertoire to play the one work on the program without any “vocal connections.” This was a three-movement duo for flute and oboe by Alberto Ginastera. He identified his final movement as a “wild fugue;” and he was not being modest about it! The composer’s Wikipedia page describes him as “one of the most important 20th-century classical composers of the Americas;” but I suspect that most of my generation knew him better by his name than by his music. I have to say that, last night, I deeply appreciated a rare opportunity for the music to take priority over the name!

The program then concluded with the “non-standard” string quintet of violinists Jennifer Cho, Dian Zhang, Barbara Riccardi, and Leslie Ludena performing with William Wasson on bass. This was my latest encounter with a new composer (Julian Milone) deciding to have his way with Georges Bizet’s Carmen opera. By now I have pretty much lost count of the many ways in which this opera has been reworked. My favorite is still the effort by David Hess and John Corigliano to turn the source into an “electric rock opera” in their album The Naked Carmen. I was reminded of this album because it included the Farandole from Bizet’s second L’Arlésienne suite, which Milone also appropriated for his Carmen Fantasy. To be fair, however, last night’s quintet was never as raucous as The Naked Carmen was!

For an encore, all contributing musicians joined forces for an engaging delivery of “To a Wild Rose,” from Edward MacDowell’s Opus 51 Woodland Sketches, providing a calming conclusion to an imaginatively diverse evening.

SFS 2025–26: Returning Conductors

Herbert Blomstedt taking a bow from the podium of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (photograph by Amrei-Marie, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

It has taken more than a little time, but this morning I can continue examining the works that will be performed by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) for the Orchestral Series of the 2025–26 season. As readers can probably guess, there is some overlap with the programs listed in the first article, which accounted for performances of “Works by Living Composers.” Today I wish to examine the list of “Returning Conductors” in the Orchestral Series. Four of those conductors were involved with those “Works by Living Composers” programs. It is worth singling them out as follows:

1. September 18–20: James Gaffigan
2. October 3–5: Gustavo Gimeno
3. May 22–24: Cristian Măcelaru
4. June 25–27: Stéphane Denève

Gaffigan will then return at the end of the season to conduct performances of June 18, 20, and 21. The remaining returning conductors will be listed in alphabetical order as follows:

• Harry Bicket: February 5–7
• Herbert Blomstedt: May 15–17
• Karina Canellakis: November 6–8
• Edward Gardner: January 15–17
• Jane Glover: December 5–6
• Manfred Honeck: February 26 and 27 and March 1
• Philippe Jordan: March 26–28
• Bernard Labadie: April 9–11
• Andrés Orozco-Estrada: March 20–22
• Donald Runnicles: September 26–28
• Dima Slobodeniouk: May 8–9
• Jaap van Zweden: January 29–31 and February 19–21
• Simone Young: April 17–19

Many (most?) readers probably know that Blomstedt is the SFS Conductor Laureate, having previously served as Music Director from 1985 to 1995 (meaning that he left shortly before my wife and I made our move from Singapore to Palo Alto). My account of his last visit to SFS appeared on this site this past January 30; and, as usual, I could not have been more satisfied with the performance. He will not be returning until May of next year, when his entire program will be devoted to Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony. I am already looking forward to the occasion!

I am also glad to see Runnicles’ return, having enjoyed him during his tenure with the San Francisco Opera. He has been keeping busy following his departure and is now Chief Conductor Designate of the Dresden Philharmonic, Music Director of Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He will also be performing Mahler during his SFS visit, accounting for “the other end of the time-line” with the first symphony. In this case, however, early Mahler will be coupled with one of the early efforts of Alban Berg. His Seven Early Songs set was composed when he was still studying under Arnold Schoenberg.

It should go without saying that all of these performances will take place in Davies Symphony Hall, which is located at 201 Van Ness Avenue and fills an entire city block. The other boundaries are Grove Street (north), Hayes Street (south), and Franklin Street (west). The main entrance (which is also the entrance to the Box Office) is on Grove Street, roughly halfway down the block. Tickets will go on sale on July 19, after which they should be available for purchase online, by calling 415-503-5351, or by visiting the Box Office in the Davies lobby.

One Found Sound Presents Spring Program

OFS musicians in performance (from the banner on the Web page for last night’s program)

Last night One Found Sound (OFS), the local orchestra that performs without a conductor, welcomed spring with a program entitled Sonic Blooms. The “flowers that bloomed,” so to speak, were two new compositions created for this year’s Emerging Composer Award competition. The winer of that competition was Ty Bloomfield with a composition entitled “FLUX // DRIVE,” given its world premiere performance. This was preceded by the West Coast premiere of the runner-up composition, “Shubho Lhaw Qolo,” by Sami Seif. This featured a solo viola performance by Sam Nelson. The second half of the program paired the Adagietto movement from Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 550 (40th) symphony in G minor.

The highest form of praise for a new work is a desire to hear it again. This was the case for both of the pieces in the first half. Not only does OFS perform without a conductor, but also they do not provide program notes. Each work receives an oral introduction; but, where the new pieces are concerned, that provided little material for either anticipation or reflection. As a result, there is little I can report about how either of these composers cultivated their respective rhetorical stances, let alone how those stances were established through approaches to instrumentation. Those that attend concerts frequently know that the capacity for listening is usually cultivated through program notes! Nevertheless, I would welcome the opportunity to encounter both of those new works in subsequent performances.

Fortunately, program notes were not necessary for the second half of the program. Both selections are frequently encountered, meaning that, probably for the most part, listeners knew what to expect. The Mahler movement was given a thoroughly engaging account with a better view of the contributing harp performance than one tends to encounter at Davies Symphony Hall. Sadly, there was no account on the OFS Web site of who that harpist was. The Mozart selection could not have been more familiar to most of the audience, but there was a freshness to the performance that sustained attention to all of those notes many listeners already know by heart.

Uneven Afternoon of Chamber Music at Davies

I tend to look forward to the Sunday afternoons of chamber music performed in Davies Symphony Hall by members of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Sadly, yesterday’s offering was more than a little uneven. Nevertheless, the second half of the program made the visit more than worth the while. The was devoted entirely to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 493, his second piano quartet composed in the key of E-flat major, a somewhat upbeat complement to its predecessor, the K. 478 piano quartet in G minor. Pianist Yuhsin Galaxy Su performed with SFS musicians Jessie Fellows on violin, violist Katie Kadarauch, and Anne Richardson on cello. All four of them delivered a solid account of the many different aspects of Mozart’s rhetoric that one encounters over the course of the quartet’s three movements. (The program book listed four, none of which represented accurately the tempo of any of movements.)

The Mozart quartet was complemented in the first half of the program by an early quartet for the same instruments composed by Gustav Mahler. The composer was just beginning to exercise his talents as a composer when he wrote his single-movement piano quartet in A minor his mid-teens. (He was finishing his first year at the Vienna Conservatory at that time.) For this selection the pianist was Samantha Cho, joined by violinist Florin Parvulescu, Yun Jie Liu on viola, and cellist David Goldblatt. It was first performed in 1876 (not in the program book’s 1866, when the composer would have been about ten years old); and Mahler himself performed the piano part when the work was first performed. This music receives relatively little attention, but it unfolds a rhetoric that anticipates the composer’s more mature efforts. One could appreciate that foreshadowing in yesterday’s account of this seldom-performed score.

Mahler and Mozart were separated by a trio performance of music by Dmitri Shostakovich with Su on piano performing with flutist Yubeen Kim and Jeein Kim on violin. This was identified only as “Five Pieces,” arranged in 1970 by Levon Atovmyan, best known for his arrangements of Shostakovich’s music for film scores. Most likely, this was one of the composer’s student efforts; and the concluding Polka movement showed promising signs of his capacity for wit.

Composer Jeremiah Siochi (photograph courtesy of SFS)

The program began with the world premiere performance of “Pelagic Poem” by Jeremiah Siochi, a duo for harp and vibraphone. He composed it for his sister, SFS harpist Katherine Siochi, who performed it with percussionist Jacob Nissly. The title refers to a zone of open ocean, which apparently attracts flocks of birds. This was very much a personal undertaking, composed for a wedding; and, as a listener that was not personally involved, I fear that it overstayed its welcome. Nevertheless, there was much to enjoy in the interplay of Nissly’s vibraphone work with Siochi’s performance on harp.

SFP to Present Recital Debut of Fleur Barron

Mezzo Fleur Barron (from the SFP event page)

Mezzo Fleur Barron will probably not be a stranger to those that partake of performances in the Civic Center. According to my records, her most recent appearance took place in Davies Symphony Hall, when she sang the title role in Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater, with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and staged for the limited available space by Peter Sellars. At the end of this month, she will return to San Francisco, this time making her recital debut with San Francisco Performances (SFP), joined by pianist Kunal Lahiry.

She has prepared a program entitled The Power and the Glory. According to the advance material I received from SFP, the program was conceived to “explore the impacts and legacies of colonialism throughout the world, highlighting songs that reflected the attitudes of their times, and may now be appreciated in an entirely new light.” When I read that material, my first impulse was to raise my left eyebrow à la Spock (if anyone still remembers Star Trek)! Nevertheless, I find it hard resist a program in which Carl Maria von Weber will be rubbing shoulders with Gustav Mahler, not to mention Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill, who probably never rubbed shoulders with each other!

This performance will begin, as usual, at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 26. Also as usual, the venue will be Herbst Theatre, which is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street and directly across Van Ness from City Hall. SFP has created its own Web page for further information. Prices range between $70 and $50. Those wishing to attend can also call 415-677-0325 to make purchases.

Mahler Returns to SFS Repertoire in Davies

Gustav Mahler in the foyer of the Vienna opera house not long after he completed his seventh symphony (photograph by Moritz Nähr, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

According to my records, my last encounter with a San Francisco Symphony (SFS) performance of a symphony by Gustav Mahler took place at the end of last June, when Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen wrapped up the subscription season with a performance of that composer’s third symphony. Since that time, however, I was also able to enjoy a performance of the fifth symphony this past November with the first Live from Orchestra Hall livestream performance in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra season. Last night Mahler returned to the SFS repertoire with a performance of the seventh symphony led by Paavo Järvi.

This symphony was one of my earliest encounters with Mahler’s music. My first serious listening began when my mother’s uncle presented me with LPs of the fifth (coupled with the Adagio from the tenth) and seventh symphonies conducted by Hermann Scherchen. That marked the beginning of a thoroughly engaging journey (which I am still enjoying)! It took a while for me to adjust to the opening ambiguity of the seventh, but it now continues to be one of my favorites.

The LP album for that symphony included the title Song of the Night, but that was never attributed to Mahler. Nevertheless, it reflects the fact that the second and fourth movements of this five-movement symphony were both given the title “Nachtmusik.” Furthermore, these two movements “frame” the shortest movement of the symphony, a Scherzo with the tempo description “Schattenhaft” (like a shadow). Another departure is the relatively solo tempo of the first movement: “Langsam – Allegro risoluto, ma non troppo.” Only the rondo of the final movement tends to follow a more conventional structure (but I use that attribute “conventional” with more than a little caution) with a rousing conclusion.

One could almost call Davies Symphony Hall a “home” for this symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted it over the course of two different seasons during his tenure as Music Director. Sadly, the second performance in May of 2019 never quite rose to the heights of the account he had provided in October of 2014. Last night Järvi’s interpretation ascended to those “heights of 2014” and may even have exceeded them.

This is a score that could live up to the movie title Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I came away with the impression that Järvi knew exactly what every instrument was doing at every moment. He accounted for every step of the way in the journey through Mahler’s five movements, and there was never an uncertain moment. His interpretation reinforced why this remains one of my favorite symphonies!

The first half of the program was devoted entirely to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 102, his second piano concerto in F major. This was composed in the spring on 1957, about four years after the death of Joseph Stalin. Shostakovich was gradually emerging out of the shadow of fear, and he composed this concerto for his son as a present for his nineteenth birthday.

There is a playfulness in this music that reflects the raucous abandon that Shostakovich enjoyed before Stalin cast his dark shadow. Piano soloist Kirill Gerstein knew exactly how to channel that playfulness, and his chemistry with Järvi could not have been better. He then took an encore of a less raucous but still engaging rhetoric by selecting the fourth (“Mélodie”) movement in E minor from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 10 Morceaux de salon (salon pieces). This moment of sunshine would set during the intermission to make way for Mahler’s nocturnal rhetoric.

Pre-College Guitar Prodigies at SFCM

This past Sunday, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released its latest video in the Live from St. Mark’s series of concerts filmed at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. This one was particularly distinctive, since, rather than seasoned professionals, it presented a quartet of guitarists currently in the Pre-College program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). Nevertheless, the repertoire is one that would challenge many (if not most) professionals, providing an excellent example of the high standards maintained in the SFCM Pre-College Guitar Department, chaired by Scott Cmiel, who introduced the program.

The members of the SFCM Pre-College Guitar Honors Quartet (Trent Park, Emilia Díaz, Kiran Lee, and Roan Holmes, not in order of appearance) playing Maher (from the YouTube video of their recital)

The performers on this video are the members of the SFCM Pre-College Guitar Honors Quartet: Trent Park, Emilia Díaz, Kiran Lee, and Roan Holmes. The selections are, to say the least, ambitious. The first is an arrangement by Stephen Goss of the opening section of the second movement of the first symphony by Gustav Mahler. To be fair, the guitar was not a stranger to Mahler; but he did not make use of it until his seventh symphony, whose instrumentation also included a mandolin (as well as cowbells). The music Goss chose to arrange, however, was the primary (opening) theme of the first symphony’s Ländler (second) movement. This was inspired by a traditional folk dance, but Mahler did not waste any time in departing from folk traditions. Nevertheless, Goss managed to capture the Ländler spirit in his arrangement; and the SFCM students could not have given a better account of that spirit.

Having given Mahler his due, the quartet could then move on to music that was actually composed for a quartet of guitars. Their selection was “Bluezilian,” composed by Clarice Assad. Those that have followed this site for some time are probably familiar with Assad’s capacity for upbeat rhetoric. Apportioning that rhetoric across four guitars just upped the ante of engagement with the attentive listener. To be fair, the selection was relatively brief (only about three minutes); but Assad always seems to know how to establish just the right expressiveness in just the right duration of time.

Taken as a whole, the video is relatively brief, clocking in at less than eight minutes. Nevertheless, there is just the right balance of depth and diversity to make the experience time well spent. Furthermore, when one considers the youth of the performers, one can hope that at least one (if not all) of them are ready to continue on a journey to future serious concert recitals.

Vox Humana SF Updates Plans for Next Month

Poster design for Vox Humana SF’s Voyages program (currently shown on the Vox Humana SF home page)

Readers may recall that, when the Vox Humana SF a cappella choir, led by its Artistic Director Don Scott Carpenter, announced its second season this past August, I was able to relate the program details for the second of the two concerts of the season. That performance, entitled Voyages, will take place in a little over a month’s time. However, I learned yesterday that there would be a change in the February program; and it seems to be appropriate to account for that change sooner rather than later.

Works that had been previously announced and will remain on the program include “God’s World” by José Daniel Vargas, which will be a world premiere performance. Other recent compositions that are still on the program will be by Joan Tower (“Descending”), Jake Heggie (“Stop this Day and Night With Me”), and Jacob Mühlrad (“Ay Li Lu”). The earlier works on the program will still be Fest- und Gedenksprüche, Johannes Brahms’ Opus 109 cycle of three motets for mixed double choir, and one of Gustav Mahler’s settings of a poem by Friedrich Rückert, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’.” As of this writing, further details involve only contributing composers, rather than specific works. Those composers are (in alphabetical, rather than chronological, order) Eleanor Alberga, John Corigliano, and Eric Whitacre.

The San Francisco performance of Voyages will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 15. The venue will be St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Most readers probably know by now that the address of the church is 1111 O’Farrell Street, one block west of the corner of Franklin Street. Ticket prices range from $30 to $71. City Box Office has created a Web page, which includes a floor plan for selecting seats as well as a hyperlink for “Quick Pick Tickets.”

DSO: New Season, New Mahler

The “composition hut” in Carinthia where Mahler worked on his fifth symphony (photograph by OboeCrack, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

According to my records, the Live from Orchestra Hall video series presented by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) concluded last season with a program consisting only of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony, led by Music Director Jader Bignamini. Early yesterday evening, my wife and I had our first opportunity of the new season to return to Orchestra Hall through cyberspace. Once again, Mahler was the focus of the program, which was devoted almost entirely to his fifth symphony in C-sharp minor. This was the second half of the program, whose first half was a much shorter symphony, Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken I/100 in G major, often known as the “Military” symphony.

As was the case with his ninth symphony, the fifth is a product of richly diverse instrumentation. For the most part, the video work could not have provided better guidance in allowing the viewer to trace how an extended theme would peregrinate from one set of instruments to another (often with a plethora of opportunities, even if they were brief, to pay attention to individual performers). Thus, while the camera work gave a generous account of how Bignamini led his ensemble, the “heart of the matter” could be found in the diversity of instrumentation. In that respect, the attentive listener was probably better informed of the full scope of that diversity by following the video work than by enjoying a seat in Orchestra Hall.

Beyond the instrumentation, however, there is also the symmetry of structure. The symphony is in five movements grouped into three parts. The “middle part” is the third and longest movement. (Indeed, it may be one of the longest movements in the overall symphonic repertoire, even if Mahler himself composed longer ones!) The first part consists of two movements, both with funereal rhetoric, even if only the first of the movements is explicitly denoted as a funeral march. The final part begins with the shortest movements, the Adagietto, which serves as a “calm before the final storm.” That “final storm” is a rondo form, which begins playfully enough and just keeps building up in intensity. It is no wonder that listeners come away from a performance feeling as if they have just left a wild ride!

Hoboken I/100 is one of Haydn’s last and better-known symphonies. The title reflects on the second movement being structured as a parade march. Indeed, the last time I encountered this music was with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony. On that occasion, the brass and percussion players did parade across the front of the stage. The DSO performance was more straightforward, but it was still clear that Haydn approached his “military” rhetoric with a twinkle in his eye!

Unless I am mistaken, this was not the first time I encountered a coupling of Haydn and Mozart. I find those occasions to be particularly satisfying. Both of them had a keen knowledge of the breadth of instruments at their command. For the most part, neither of them shied away from intense attention to structure on both the short and the long scale. Ironically, the Mahler biographies I have encountered have little (if anything) to say about Haydn. (His name never shows up on Mahler’s Wikipedia page.)

In any event I now find myself looking forward to which Mahler symphony Bignamini will choose for his next undertaking, and it will not surprise me if he couples it with another Haydn symphony!

Vox Humana SF Announces Second Season

Don Scott Carpenter leading the debut performance of Vox Humana SF

Following up on its debut this past February, Vox Humana SF, the a cappella choir led by its Artistic Director Don Scott Carpenter, has planned two concerts in San Francisco for the coming season. The first of these will be performed only in San Francisco, and the other will “tour” to Belvedere and Healdsburg. City Box Office has created a single Web page for both of these events, which includes specific information about the music to be performed. However, here is a basic summary of what to expect:

Friday, November 8, 7:30 p.m., Grace Cathedral: Sergei Rachmaninoff’s a cappella All-Night Vigil, a setting of the Vespers service, will be performed in its entirety. The will be preceded by two selections by Dmitry Bortniansky, the first Russian to lead the Imperial Chamber Choir when he was appointed in 1796. He composed a series of “concertos” for this ensemble. The program will begin with the eighteenth of these, a setting of Psalm 92 (“It Is Good To Praise the Lord”). He composed seven pieces under the title Kjeruvimskije pjesni (cherubic hymns), the last of which will be performed after the Psalm setting.

Saturday, February 15, 7:30 p.m., St. Mark’s Lutheran Church: Voyages will be a much more diverse offering. The program will begin with the earliest composition, the “Gloria” setting from the 1597 Sacrae Symphoniae collection by Giovanni Gabrieli. The newest will be “God’s World” by José Daniel Vargas and “Paklalakbay” by Robin Estrada, both of which will receive world premiere performances. Other recent compositions will be by Joan Tower (“Descending”), Jake Heggie (“Stop this Day and Night With Me”), and Jacob Mühlrad (“Ay Li Lu”). The nineteenth century will be represented by Fest- und Gedenksprüche, Johannes Brahms’ Opus 109 cycle of three motets for mixed double choir. This will be complemented by one of Gustav Mahler’s settings of a poem by Friedrich Rückert, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’.”

Salonen Concludes SFS Season with Mahler

The frontispiece and title page of the third volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, whose imagery may have inspired Mahler’s settings of the texts (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany license, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the final program of the current subscription season. That program consisted only of Gustav Mahler’s third symphony. This is the middle of a set of three symphonies often known as the “Wunderhorn” symphonies, because they all included movements setting texts of poems from the collection of German folk poems and songs compiled and edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, given the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the boy’s magic horn).

The symphony is a long one, usually lasting about one hour and 40 minutes. It is divided into two “parts,” the first of which consists of only a single movement about 30 minutes in duration. The second part collects the remaining five movements. The penultimate movement is the “Wunderhorn” movement, setting a text that begins “Es sungen drei Engel einen süssen Gesang” (three angels sang a sweet song), an account of Peter’s entry into heaven after his sins were forgiven by Jesus. This is preceded by a more secular vocal movement, the “Midnight Song” from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, delivered last night by mezzo Kelley O’Connor. These two relatively short vocal movements are followed by a lengthier slow movement that concludes the symphony. Those three movements tend to be performed with little interruption, suggesting that the work is actually a four-movement symphony with the final movement in three parts.

Salonen could not have done a better job in negotiating the complexities of this monster of a symphony. Mahler had a keen sense of instrumental coloration, and Salonen knew exactly how to elicit the full spectrum of those colors from his ensemble. When I have examined Mahler scores, I have often come across the tempo marking “Nicht schleppen;” and the tempo never lagged under Salonen’s command of the beat. What one can only appreciate in a concert setting (regardless of the high quality of any recording) is how the thematic material is widely distributed across an almost incredible number of different instrumental combinations. Whatever the tempo may be, there is always no end of “action” as phrases keep emerging from different sections in the ensemble. This is music is which sight informs the ear as much as the sounds do.

This was clearly an evening in which Salonen knew how to bring out the best from the SFS ensemble. Those of us that have followed his tenure closely can readily acknowledge how great an asset he has been. As always, I shall be looking forward to what he will bring to next season’s repertoire. My only regret is that the scope of looking forward will be limited to only one more season.

A Vocal Album of Many Colorful Contexts

Samuel Hasselhorn on the cover of his new album

Tomorrow harmonia mundi will release a new album of performances by baritone Samuel Hasselhorn accompanied by the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Łukasz Borowicz. The full title of the album is Urlicht: Songs of Death and Resurrection; and, for those that really cannot wait, the Amazon.com Web page is currently processing pre-orders! For many readers, both the title and the subtitle are likely to invoke associations with Gustav Mahler; so it is no surprise that four of the ten selections on the album are Mahler compositions. Two of them are settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (the boy’s magic horn: old German songs); and the other two draw upon poems by Friedrich Rückert, which Mahler had collected in a set of five given the title Rückert-Lieder. Woven among these selections are vocal settings by (in order of appearance) Engelbert Humperdinck, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Pfitzner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Walter Braunfels, and Alban Berg.

In the interest of “full disclaimer,” I should make it clear (to those that do not already know) that I am an unabashed sucker for the development of “new music” that took place during that transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in German-speaking countries. I find it a bit interesting that Friedrich Rückert received more attention than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. However, one of the surprises on this album comes from Pfitzner’s setting of “Herr Oluf” (Sir Oluf), a poem by Goethe’s contemporary, Johann Gottfried Herder, which may well have inspired Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” now best known for its vocal setting by Franz Schubert (D. 328).

Those familiar with the Mahler songs will most likely be satisfied with Hasselhorn’s approaches to them. Personally, however, I have to confess to a soft spot for the Korngold selection. This is the aria from Die tote Stadt (the dead city), which begins with the text “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen” (my yearning, my illusion), usually known as “Pierrot’s Tanzlied” (Pierrot’s dance-song). Those that have followed this site for some time probably know that I am a sucker to this opera and have been fortunate enough to see it twice (once on television and once on the stage). Indeed, I recalled those experiences a little less than a year ago, when violinist Bruno Monteiro included a chamber music version of it on one of his albums.

The order of the composers other than Mahler on this album is not a chronological one. However, there is still some sense of a “journey” from the “traditional” rhetoric of Humperdinck to the “adventurous” stance that permeates the entire score of Wozzeck. There is thus some sense of “progression” when one attentively follows how one track leads to another across the entire album. It is through that sense that the entire album transcends any sense of a business-as-usual experience.

Taken as a whole, the album left me thinking about what Hasselhorn’s next endeavor will be!

Madison Smith to Return with Benefit Concert

About a month ago I learned that soprano Madison Smith would be returning to give a performance after almost ten years. I have to confess that I took this news very personally. Unless I am mistaken, Smith’s Graduate Recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was the topic of the very first article I wrote for Examiner.com. I was delighted to discover that this was one of the few Examiner.com articles to benefit from an online archive, and I have to confess that it was with a bit of relief that I found I could reread the article without blushing!

Poster for the concert being discussed (from the Web page for ticket purchases)

After that recital the two of us went our separate ways (or, more accurately, Smith moved on while I remained at my desk). Now, in about a month’s time, she will be performing again in San Francisco. She has prepared a program entitled Echoes of Innocence, which is structured around the performance of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (songs on the death of children) song cycle. As of this writing, the other works to be performed have not yet been finalized. Smith will be accompanied at the piano by Margaret Halbig.

This will be a two-hour program beginning at 5 p.m. on Sunday, June 23. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street. (This makes it convenient to public transportation lines that stop at the corner of Church Street and 24th Street.) All tickets are being sold for $50, and a Web page has been created for online purchase. A portion of all sales will be donated to UNICEF, and the percentage of the donation will increase with the number of tickets sold.

SFSYO Takes on Mahler’s’ Fifth Symphony

One of the reasons that I do my best to try to keep up with performances by the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) is that, over the course of my many years of following them, they have never been afraid of challenging repertoire. That said, this afternoon’s program in Davies Symphony Hall took the challenges to a new level. Wattis Foundation Music Director Daniel Stewart led the full forces of the ensemble in a performance of Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony, composed (at least on the title page) in the key of C-sharp minor.

This was the only work on the program, clocking in at around 75 minutes in duration. It is particularly interesting in the way Mahler conceived it as an arch-like structure in five movements. The “keystone” is (of course) the middle movement, a Scherzo, which is usually the longest of the five. (Depending on the conductor, it comes in somewhere around twenty minutes—a “full-length” composition unto itself, so to speak.) It is preceded by two very dark movements, both of which are dominated by funeral marches. (The first is explicitly designated as a funeral march. The second is designated as “stormy;” but a funeral is taking place in the midst of the cloudburst.) It is only after the Scherzo that the intensity dies down a bit with an Adagietto scored only for strings (including a harp). This turns out to be the “calm before the storm” of the concluding Rondo, which, in true Finale form, brings back several fragments from the preceding movements while marching again, this time with more energetic determination, climaxing in what almost amounts to a race to the finish line.

That overall plan poses a major challenge to any symphonic ensemble, let alone one of young performers not yet ready to start thinking about their future professions. Fortunately, the SFSYO players enjoy the resources of a moderately large Coaching Faculty, consisting almost entirely of members of the San Francisco Symphony. Thus, even when the conductor may leave much to be desired (in my case that meant, during this season, blowing both hot and cold), there is no doubting that the players themselves are well-trained.

In that context I came away from this afternoon’s performance feeling that they were definitely well-equipped to take on Mahler. That said, I also often felt as if Stewart was spending more time “going with the flow,” rather than “channeling” it. In addition, from time to time it struck me that he was focusing primarily on providing punctuation marks, not all of which seemed to have reinforced the rhetoric that Mahler had laid out (usually highly specifically) in his score.

I also found myself wondering, during the final movement, whether Mahler had deliberately created a “Das Bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel” moment. I first encountered this in an anecdote that involved someone accusing Johannes Brahms as borrowing from Ludwig van Beethoven. Brahms replied, (in the English translation) “Any jackass can see that!” In that vein I found myself thinking how one of the themes in that final Rondo sounded like the entrance of the Mastersingers. Given Mahler’s experience in conducting Wagner operas, I suspect that he decided to have a bit of fun with the audience for his fifth symphony.

Walking back from Davies I decided that, while this may not have been my most satisfying Mahler experience, I was glad that the players had an opportunity to explore all the complexities in that score and then rise to its many challenges.