French Organ Music at the SF Symphony

In the SF Symphony's last subscription concert of their year-long season last Thursday, conductor Stéphane Denève led the orchestra in an all-French program that prominently featured Davies Hall's monster Ruffatti organ. In a charming speech introducing the program, we learned that the final "s" is NOT silent when pronouncing Camille Saint-Saëns and that the French music on the program was actually influenced by German models from Beethoven and J.S. Bach. The short opening work was Guillaume Connesson's 2012 Flammenschrift, which was described as a riff on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but it sounded more like Prokofiev's Parisian-era music to me, which is not a bad thing. (Photos, except noted, are by Brittany Hosea-Small.)

Though not marketed as having anything to do with SF's Gay Pride Weekend, the concert certainly could have been, since its two main composers, Poulenc and Saint-Saëns, were Gallic Friends of Dorothy. Poulenc's composition was his 1938 Organ Concerto in G Minor, a strange piece for organ, strings, and timpani that alternated between dour pronouncements from the organ soloist interspersed with flashes of witty, zippy music in the strings familiar from Poulenc's other compositions.

Afficionados of organ music are a select breed of their own, and they seemed to be entranced by the performance of Olivier Latry, Notre-Dame's titular organist since 1985. Though I know many organ music worshipers, I have never been a member of the organ cult myself, since the sound of it registers as trying to walk through liquid. The volume dynamics were odd, too, either soft or extremely loud and not much in between.

After a couple of curtain calls, the orchestra started to leave for intermission but sat back down quickly when Latry swiveled around onto the bench for a long, solo encore that was enjoyable and made me feel like a philistine for not appreciating his art. (Photo by Michael Strickland

The second half was Camille Saint-Saëns's 1886 Symphony No. 3, "Organ" in a punchy performance that rattled the hall during its famous last movement.

Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

A free concert by an all-volunteer orchestra pulled off a small miracle at Herbst Theater on Sunday afternoon. Though I usually avoid these kind of concerts because the audiences are often so unruly, I attended the second half of the program because the Mozart to Mendelssohn orchestra was performing Henryk Górecki's 1976 Symphony No. 3, which I had never heard live before.

John Kendall Bailey, the ensemble's Music Director, explained that Górecki (1933-2010) was a leading modernist Polish composer of the 1960s who turned to a "holy minimalism" in the 1970s, culminating in the hour-long, three-movement "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" for orchestra and solo soprano. His international serial music colleagues were appalled at the betrayal, with Pierre Boulez exclaming "Merde!" at the premiere, though Polish audiences quickly took the music to heart. In 1993, Nonesuch released a recording with David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta and soprano Dawn Upshaw singing the sad, gorgeous Polish folk songs about mothers separated from children. The recording received quite a bit of play on United Kingdom classical radio and became a viral sensation soon after, selling millions of copies. Bailey mentioned that the symphony had not been played in the SF Bay Area sice 1994 when David Zinman conducted a performance by the San Francisco Symphony, which seems a ridiculously long time for such a once-popular work to lie dormant.

The professional soprano soloist at Sunday's concert was Marnie Breckenridge, who was magnificent and intensely moving. The vocal line requires a certain purity of tone and expression, and Breckenridge nailed it.

The unexpected joy of the afternoon was twofold. First, the large, volunteer string orchestra gave a completely creditable performance. There were woodwinds that played briefly at the midpoint climax of the first movement, and they were fine too. Secondly, the audience fell under a trance-like spell in the slow, rising canon of the first movement and remained silently attentive for the entire symphony. Now that was a miracle, and congratulations to everyone involved.

Chiharu Shiota Exhibit at the Asian

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum is hosting Two Home Countries, an exhibit of the work of the 54-year-old artist Chiharu Shiota, who lives in both Germany and Japan.

The signage on entering the exhibit was amusing. Instead of "Don't Touch The Art!" we were offered positive reinforcement instead.

The caution was necessary because the first installation, Diary, surrounds the viewer in an 88-foot web of red yarn that feels magical.

Embedded in the thickets of yarn are pages from recovered diaries of Japanese soldiers in World War Two along with journals from post-war Germans.

The exhibit also features drawings...

...and a video of the naked artist being bound with strings, which is reminiscent of performance artist Marina Abramović, one of Chiharu Shiota's mentors.

This exhibit debuted last year at the Japan Society in New York City, along with a one-man, English-language stage show adaptation of Yukio Mishima's 1956 novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion). Reviews of the play were not particularly favorable, but the set design by Shiota consisting of strings transformed by lighting and projections were universally praised. You can see for yourself through July 27th at the Asian.

Tianyi Lu Conducts the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony program last weekend was trashed by two critics I admire, Steven Winn at SFCV and Joshua Kosman at On a Pacific Aisle, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Maybe I was in just in the mood, but I thought the conducting of the young conductor Tianyi Lu was remarkable, The program started with Zhiân, a 2023 piece by the Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi. The work for large orchestra was written in solidarity with the women of Iran protesting against their theocratic government, and it bounced all over the place, but by the end of its 13 minutes I was enjoying its sound world. (All photos by Brandon Patoc.)

This was followed by Korngold's 1945 Violin Concerto, the composer's return to "serious" music after writing innumerable Hollywood film scores over the last decade, some of which are classics on their own terms. The critical reception of the violin concerto was dismissive at the time, but it's a fun piece with some enchanting tunes repurposed from Bette Davis movies and adventure epics. The young Spanish soloist María Dueñas was a disappointment in her solo role, recessive when the music required more assertion, but the orchestra under Lu was doing all kinds of interesting things with Korngold's score.

After intermission, Lu conducted the best version I have ever heard of Rimsky-Korsakov's 1888 symphonic suite, Scheherazade. The piece can be a long slog because it's basically a few catchy tunes repeated over and over for 45 minutes without much variation.

Last Saturday, though, I was entranced by the Technicolor spectacle throughout, and was impressed with the conductor's ability to keep a musical line drawn through the entire piece while playing around with soft and loud dynamics in unusual ways that kept the music interesting. I hope Tianyi Lu is invited back again.