Esa Pekka-Salonen has now been the San Francisco Music Director for about three years, and the happiest surprise for me has been his conducting of traditional warhorses, like the 1873
Variations on a Theme of Haydn by Johannes Brahms, which was the opener for last weekend's subscription concerts. The reading was traditional but clean, as if decades of interpretive accretions had been scrubbed away.
(Photo by Brandon Patoc.)
Salonen is also an expert conductor of contemporary music, and the concert continued with a world premiere commission to Swedish composer Anders Hillborg for a piano concerto written for the 74-year-old pianist Emanuel Ax.
It's the second piano concerto composed by Hillborg, and it is subtitled
The MAX Concerto, in honor of "Manny Ax."
The concerto is a little over 20 minutes, an uninterrupted, episodic journey through nine different kinds of music, all of which I found delightful. Though half of my friends at the concert were not impressed,
Joshua Kosman at the SF Chronicle seems to have agreed with me, and wrote a nice appreciation of the piece.
After intermission, Salonen conducted a rock-and-roll performance of Beethoven's
Symphony No. 2 from 1802. This is an overplayed work that can be deadly dull, but Salonen led the orchestra at a wildly vigorous pace, and it worked well. The tunes are still causing earworms, which is a high compliment.
(Photo by Brandon Patoc.)
I agree that the Brahms and Beethoven pieces sounded great (I'd forgotten how funny the Beethoven can be), but for me, the piano concerto was the highlight of the concert. There were colors in the orchestration that I'd never heard before, from the very beginning. One device that Hillborg used was for the piano to play and hold a note, but have it echo over and over, into silence. I couldn't figure out what was happening until I that the repetitions were played by the woodwinds. Who would imagine that they could sound like a quiet piano? I certainly hope that they record this piece. It's the best piece of modern music I've heard in a long time.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your take on the concerto, Jim. I was sitting behind an annoying couple during the Brahms so I moved up to the front row for the Hillborg Concerto and ended up sitting right in front of Emanuel Ax. In truth, it was hard to pick out which instruments were doing what because I was so close to the piano, but I really enjoyed it too. Something that nobody else seemed to notice was that Ax had white bandages on the end of his left thumb and left pinky finger during Friday's performance. Wonder what was going on.
ReplyDeleteI did notice the bandages, and I cannot imagine playing anything, let alone the world premiere of a piano concerto, with bandages on my fingers. My only thought was that he wore them to make it easier to play the full-keyboard glissandi, of which there were several.
ReplyDeleteSorry about the annoying couple. My friends joke that I am a magnet for people with coughs or jangly bracelets or phones that they don't know how to silence. Last night at the opera, Lohengrin, there was someone with a phone or an alarm that kept ringing. I'm probably not the only person who fantasized that one of the soldiers on stage would hurl his spear.