Semana de Los Muertos at the SF Symphony

Last Friday at Davies Hall one of the translucent acoustic tiles decided to join the musicians onstage before the all-Russian concert of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto #1 and Shostakovich's Symphony #7 "Leningrad".

The musicians looked startled at the intrusion...

...but stage management managed to hoist the thing back into place without too much of a delay.

Prokofiev's first piano concerto is a 15-minute barn-burner that the composer wrote in 1911 while still at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. It's one of my favorite pieces of music, with an abundance of catchy melodies and intense rhythmic energy. Unfortunately, the Ukranian soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk above made a hash of it, playing too fast and eliding all the fun.

After intermission, debuting guest conductor Karina Canellakis led the huge orchestra in Shostakovich's Symphony #7. The 80-minute work was written during World War Two, some of it in Leningrad (the renamed St. Petersburg) during the Nazi siege on that city which eventually killed over a million people through bombing, starvation, and cold.

The symphony is a sprawling, four-movement work that was "lavishly praised in wartime, then largely dismissed in its aftermath," according to liner notes by Richard Whitehouse for Vasily Petrenko's Shostakovich set. It's still being largely dismissed, with the SF Chronicle's Joshua Kosman writing in his review of this performance, "The music can often meander around slowly, this way and that, like a drunk looking for a missing set of keys."

In the distant past, I often found Shostakovich's music bombastic and meandering, but after enough great performances at the SF Symphony with young conductors like Urbanski and Petrenko, I changed my mind and always give Shostakovich the benefit of the doubt. Petrenko has an interesting quote: "I've met a few people still alive who listened to all the first broadcasts of these war symphonies [#7-#9] and they've told me how they were sitting in the kitchen listening to the Seventh, and what a powerful emotional effect it had on them; the Eighth was more challenging, but they understood it; after the Ninth they got up in silence and left the room. The message was so clear: we may have won the war, but the same guy [Stalin} is in charge."

The young American conductor Karina Cannellakis led a performance last week that was alternately gorgeous and meandering. The long first movement, where an earworm of a banal war march intrudes into a lively, peaceful scene sounded more like Bolero than the dark, grotesquely satirical joke it is meant to envision, and she found it impossible to pull all the disparate moods of the long symphony together. However, the orchestra sounded magnificent, especially percussionist Jacob Nissly and the entire 23-person brass section above. It was powerful hearing the work live for the first time and I look forward to hearing it again with a conductor who can pull it all together.