Last night saw the first performance in Davies Symphony Hall for the new San Francisco Symphony (SFS) concert series. The conductor was David Afkham, who had made his SFS debut in the fall season of 2025. On that occasion his program was based entirely on two Russian composers from the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich. This time the program was structured around Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, the “dynamic duo” of the mid-nineteenth century. The program, as a whole, consisted of overture, concerto, and symphony, but not in the usual order.
Unsuk Chin (courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes)
The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Brahms with the performance of one of his early compositions, the Opus 15 (first) piano concerto in D minor. This was paired on the other side of the intermission with Robert Schumann’s final symphony, the Opus 120 (fourth) in D minor. The program began in the more immediate present with Unsuk Chin’s “subito con forza,” composed in 2020. Garrick Ohlsson was the concerto soloist; and he performed a single encore of Frédéric Chopin’s, the first (in the of A-flat major) of the three waltzes collected in Opus 34. Following tonight’s second performance, Ohlsson will return to Davies on Sunday afternoon for chamber music performances of Johannes Brahms Opus 87, his second piano trio in C major, and Amy Beach’s only piano quintet, her Opus 67 in F-sharp minor.
The title of Chin’s composition was a reflection on Ludwig van Beethoven, more precisely his Opus 62 “Coriolan Overture.” While she seems to have been inspired by Beethoven’s confrontation with his hearing loss, I was more drawn to the overall rhetoric of her music, turning Beethoven’s intense gestures into a wild ride. She also had a keen sense of timing, knowing how to sustain a duration that was neither too short nor too long.
Taken as a whole, one could say that the program was a confrontation between the present and nineteenth centuries. That said, the intensity of rhetoric in both Schumann and Brahms definitely withstood that confrontation! Next week’s All San Francisco Concert will provide another such confrontation, and I am looking forward to it!
