The Flaming Phoenix Arises at the San Francisco Symphony

An extraordinary world premiere opened the San Francisco Symphony's concerts last week. The Chinese-born, South Carolina-living composer Fang Man was commissioned to write a work by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen that could be paired with the rarely performed Franz Liszt "symphonic poem" Prometheus. The result was the 25-minute Song of the Flaming Phoenix, which is one of the wildest, most original pieces of music I have ever heard. It felt like an historic occasion.

The composer was interviewed onstage on Friday evening by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen right before the second performance of her concerto, and she gushed with such emotion and pleasure at the work of the orchestra, Salonen, and her soloist Wu Wei that I didn't think they would get her off the stage.

In an interview in the program, Fang Man says: "Esa-Pekka gave me this huge orchestra to write for. I was just thrilled when I saw the instrumentation...a total of over 90 musicians. How many times does a composer get to write for such a large orchestra? I love composing for the orchestra; I have an absolute passion for it." Boy, does she ever, composing a work with its own internal logic that is loud, rhythmically percussive, and marvelously inventive in its use of every instrument in the orchestra.

Wu Wei is the current global master of one of the world's oldest instruments, the sheng, a mouth organ composed of bamboo pipes encased in metal. Fang Man began the work writing the solo concerto part, and it's beyond virtuosic, and so was Wu Wei's performance. What was astonishing throughout was that the instrument which variously sounds like a harmonica, an organ, an accordion, and a theremin managed to pierce through the wall of sound from the 90-piece orchestra. It was amazing. Whether somebody loved or hated the piece, everybody walked into intermission going, "Wow, that was something!"

The second half resumed with Liszt's Second Piano Concerto with the soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who I had never seen before but his legend preceded him. Possibly because of affairs in the world, the performance by orchestra and soloist sounded martial, in a Hungarian Idependence way that Liszt sometimes channeled. I wouldn't want to hear it played that way all the time, but it was an exciting and skillful performance.

Dessert was provided by Scriabin's The Poem of Ecstasy for the 90+ musicians. The piece reminds me of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, where there is two minutes of anthemic, transcendent, climactic music and 25 minutes of driveling around. In the Strauss, the good part comes at the beginning. In the Scriabin, it comes at the end, and we walked out of Davies Hall vibrating from its massive sound.