James Gaffigan Conducting the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony continued with their semi-post-pandemic concerts at Davies Hall last Thursday. The lobby is empty, everyone wears masks, and you need proof of vaccination to sit in the orchestra section. At this point, only strings and percussion are allowed onstage because wind instruments, including voices, are designed to blow air outwards.

One of my favorite conductors, James Gaffigan, was on the podium introducing his program that started with Talisman by a young British composer, Freya Waley-Cohen, followed by Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, and finished off with Barber's perennial Adagio for Strings.

I listened to Talisman a couple of times on YouTube (click here) and couldn't make heads or tails of the piece written for 13 strings. Often a live performance will make a new piece more audibly legible, but that wasn't the case and the fault was probably mine. Kosman at the SF Chronicle appreciated it and so did my concert companion, remarking that he loved the delicacy of the sounds made by the 13 players each doing their own thing. (The photo above and all those following are by Kristen Loken.)

The meat of the program was Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written for a string sextet in 1899 at the beginning of the composer's career, and expanded for a string orchestra in 1917. The work is High German/Austrian Romantic, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel about a couple in the dark woods where the woman confesses ""I am carrying a child, and not by you." In the second half, the man accepts and exalts the situation out of transcendent love. Before the musical performance, Cassandra Hunter recited an English translation of the poem with grace.

Gaffigan explained that they were going to be projecting the poem at its various musical moments on supertitle screens. "And if you hate that, don't look at it," he advised. I didn't know the famous work at all and appreciated the titles which were useful markers for the densely chromatic, sensual music as it made its way to a rapturous finale.

Though Barber's Adagio for Strings is a staple of classical music radio stations and movie soundtracks, this may have been my first live performance. Gaffigan kept the schmaltz factor to a minimum, building clearly and deliberately to the emotional climax. His conducting and evident joy in his string ensemble felt like a burst of sheer energetic joy all evening.

These concerts are continuing on Thursday and Friday evenings for five more weeks, and the SF Symphony just announced that on account of changes in the pandemic regulations for San Francisco on June 15th, the final two concerts conducted by new Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen will feature the entire orchestra, including brass instruments, in performances of Brahms' Violin Concerto and Schumann's Symphony No. 3.