I Still Dance at the SF Symphony

The composer John Adams was commissioned to write a piece commemorating the last, 25th season of Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony. Dedicated to both MTT and his spouse Joshua Robison, I Still Dance is an eight-minute blast of energy for a large orchestra that strikes me as one of the best pieces Adams has ever composed. Think of Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine, triple the complexity, all underlaid by a propulsive rhythm that doesn't stop until the surprisingly apt, gentle ending.

At the bows, Adams pointed to Robison in the stage right box. From the title of the piece, some people expected a riff on a ballroom dance rather than this ferocious, richly energetic piece, but it made me want to stand up and dance to its constantly changing rhythms. Can't wait to hear it again when it will be paired with Mahler's 6th in March before visiting Carnegie Hall.

This was followed by Rachmaninoff's Fourth Piano Concerto with the latest fleet-fingered Russian sensation, Daniil Trifonov. The marketing materials for Trifonov make him look like a dreamy Russian version of Ryan Gosling, but in person he came across across as wildly eccentric. His long hair obscured his face for most of the performance, with his back curving into hunchback positions, and extraordinarily long fingers that looked like they could play anything, even Rachmaninoff at his most fearsome, with perfect ease. I'm not much of a Rachmaninoff fan and SF Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman slagged Trifonov's earlier performance on Thursday, so expectations were low. However, the concerto itself is weird and all over the place in an interesting way, and Trifonov gave a memorable, virtuosic performance, and the orchestra under MTT was superb. I enjoyed myself completely.

After intermission, MTT conducted Schumann's Symphony #3 "Rhenish". 19th Century music has never been Tilson Thomas's strength, but there have been some spectacular exceptions over the decades. This wasn't one of them, though the stately, brooding fourth movement, Feierlich, was moving, but the the remaining four movements just felt slow,