Shostakovich and Brahms at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony presented two major works this weekend, conducted by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The first half was Dmitri Shostakovich's Violin Concerto #1, composed in 1948 but unperformed until 1955 when Stalin was safely in a grave. Because my brain is a memory sieve these days, I couldn't remember if I had ever heard the piece before. Thanks to this blog's search engine it turns out that I had heard the awesome German violinist Christian Tetzlaff perform as soloist with Susanna Malkki conducting the SF Symphony in 2015. The forgotten review started with: "one of the most stupendous, virtuosic, soulful musical performances of my long concertgoing life."

Unfortunately, that was not the case with Saturday evening's performance where violinist Sayaka Shoji was the soloist. This was her debut with the orchestra, and for me it was disappointing. This is difficult, expressive music, and she seemed to play every note perfectly while missing the meaning throughout. (All onstage production photos, except for the final one, are by Stefan Cohen.)

The four-movement work starts with a long Nocturne, which should set a sad, meditative tone but instead felt like being stuck in a dull way station. Shoji handled the fast movements better, but completely missed the diabolical sarcasm of the second and the village fiddler joy in the fourth. The long, slow third-movement Passacaglia is the heart of the work, ending with an extended cadenza for the soloist which should make you want to stand up and cheer at the end, but that wasn't the case on Saturday.

I had been talking up the exciting violin concerto to Austin and James, above, and felt like a liar when they both came to intermission with a "meh" expression.

Shostakovich composed the concerto for the legendary Russian violinist David Oistrakh and there are a number of his great recordings of the work on YouTube. If you are interested, click here.

The second half of the program was devoted to Brahms' Symphony #4. After another blog search, I was reminded of a masterful rendition by Herbert Blomstedt and the SF Symphony in 2020, right before the pandemic. Salonen's Brahms was quite a different experience, but completely valid and interesting in its own way. He took the symphony at a much faster pace than I am used to, excepting the slow second movement, and it worked brilliantly.

The individual soloists in the orchestra were a continuous delight, from Eugene Izotov on oboe to Ed Stephan on tympani, who led the orchestra's muscular, driving rendition with ferocious energy.