Last night was the 100th anniversary of the day on which the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) gave its first performance. With Esa-Pekka Salonen on the podium serving as guest conductor, the program offered an imaginative set of perspectives on past, present, and future. The result could not have been a better account of the significant role that SFS has come to play in not only the musical life but also the very cultural fabric of the city of San Francisco.
The approach to the past had a somewhat oblique symmetry to it. SFS introduced itself 100 years ago with the music of Richard Wagner, the prelude to the first act of his opera Die Meistersinger. That salutatory gesture portended a seriousness of purpose that would not weaken in the face of musical complexity. Last night’s program concluded with Wagner; and, if the Meistersinger prelude stands as Wagner’s most sophisticated introduction, last night presented his most elaborate, monumental, and profound parting gesture, the final scene from Götterdämmerung. Often known as “Brünnhilde’s Immolation,” this was preceded by four earlier orchestral episodes from the opera: the depiction of dawn following Brünnhilde’s first night of love with Siegfried, the interlude known as “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” and the funeral march that follows Siegfried’s slaying. Salonen presented these as a seamless suite of four movements, and Christine Brewer sang Brünnhilde in the final scene.
Almost six months ago San Francisco became a focus of attention for Wagner lovers with three performances of the full four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen by the San Francisco Opera. The intensity of that Götterdämmerung left many of us with what I could only describe as “Wagner withdrawal,” that aching Sehnsucht of the hope that it would never end. Last night revived those pangs of withdrawal through both Brewer’s heartfelt interpretation of ending, not only of Brünnhilde’s life but also of the very world inhabited by the entire Ring cycle.
However, this is a farewell to a world whose passing is as inevitable as it is justified. From the very beginning it is presented to us as a world of deceit, theft, and homicide. Taken as a whole, Götterdämmerung is that part of the story that depicts the end of it all; and, through Wagner’s leitmotif technique, the music is always reminding the listener of how all this came to pass. Salonen’s command of this “vocabulary” yielded an impeccable account of both the orchestral excerpts and the final scene. Furthermore, because the orchestra was on stage rather than in a pit, one could better appreciate the intricate sophistication of Wagner’s effort. One could observe how different combinations of instruments would alternate in relating the “words” of the narrative; and all this was masterfully managed by Salonen’s sense of dynamic balance and pace of the tempo. The result not only recognized the past but positively glorified it.
Present and future were accounted for through one of Salonen’s own compositions, a violin concerto that he completed in 2009, composed for the young violinist Leila Josefowicz. Those who heard “Lachen Verlernt” (laughing unlearned), an unaccompanied violin chaconne that Salonen composed for Jennifer Koh in 2002, when Koh performed it in Herbst in March of 2010 know that Salonen is very much in his element when writing for violin. (As a Finn, he has one of the best possible predecessors in this respect, Jean Sibelius.) The concerto is a full four-movement composition, whose first three movements are played without interruption and whose final movement takes about as much time as the combined duration of the other movements. The fact that the final movement is entitled “Adieu” is a clear signature that this disproportionate balance of durations reflects back on Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, whose final movement happens to have the same “farewell” title in German (“Der Abschied”).
There is also a certain imbalance in the use of instrumental resources. The score imposes intense virtuosic demands on the soloist. Those demands begin with the opening gesture and rarely let up until the conclusion. Indeed, in the course of the first two movements, the orchestra seems to serve as little more than a very modest continuo with a wider assortment of sonorities. It is only in the third movement that the ensemble establishes itself as a “major player” in engagement with the soloist; and the shock of that shift in balance is positively stunning. This is a movement of dazzling diversity (the percussion section includes a dance band drum set), creating the effect of the soloist emerging from the disciplined studies of a sheltered conservatory life into the brash “real world” of contemporary life. This sets the scene for the emotional leave-taking of the final movement, as impassioned in the rhetoric of the present as Brünnhilde’s scene had been in that of the nineteenth-century.
In this setting, then, the future was embodied in Josefowicz herself, still young but with a well-established concert career. (She was last in San Francisco for a San Francisco Performances recital this past March.) She has a strong grounding in the traditional violin repertoire, but her approach to new additions is fearless. Her chemistry with Salonen-as-conductor reflected a firm bond of communication with Salonen-the-composer. Through her relationship with both sides of Salonen, she offered an execution of his challenging composition in the best possible light, leaving many (certainly this listener) with a strong urge to hear this concerto more often. If this is what her generation of performers is bringing to the repertoire, then the future is indeed a bright one.
I suggested above that, in composing for violin, Salonen may have been influenced by a “cultural memory” of his fellow Finn Sibelius. Salonen chose to begin last night’s program with Sibelius’ Opus 49 tone poem “Pohjola’s Daughter.” Composed in 1906 this made for a perfect example of the value of retrospection over the distance of a century. On the surface level the differences between Salonen and Sibelius are obvious. Nevertheless, there are undercurrents of rhetoric in how Salonen plays out the material in his concerto that may reflect Sibelius’ own rhetorical strategies. Furthermore, in “Pohjola’s Daughter” those strategies, in turn, reflect back on the bardic tradition of Kalevala, the source for both Opus 49 and many of Sibelius’ other tone poems. One could sense this bardic style in Salonen’s approach to phrasing the execution of Opus 49, beginning with the once-upon-a-time opening of the cello solo through the handing off of the plot line to different instruments as the narrative progresses. Whether or not this is a literal account of that narrative is less important than the attention of the score to the act of narration of itself, and Salonen provided a convincing depiction of those bardic activities.
Happy Birthday, SFS; and thank you for the promise of another exciting century of music-making!
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