French Life and Death at the SF Symphony

There was a lovely concert in Davies Hall this weekend featuring the SF Symphony Chorus singing Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, marred only by the ugly war between management and the 32 paid choristers who are working without a contract. (The remaining choristers are skilled, unpaid volunteers accepted through auditions.) For a full account of the current mess, click here for Janos Gereben's recent wrapup at San Francisco Classical Voice.

The debuting guest conductor was Kazuki Yamada, a 46-year-old Japanese protégé of the late Seiji Ozawa. He is currently based in Berlin, conducting throughout Europe, and has always wanted to go up a hill on a cable car in San Francisco. In an opening speech, he mentioned that his cable car wish had finally been fulfilled. His entire program was French music except for the short opener, Entwine, written by Dai Fujikura, a 47-year-old Japanese composer based in London. The piece was commissioned by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and its moody astringency unfortunately took me right back to that time.

The pick-me-up immediately following was Ravel's 1931 Piano Concerto in G Major with Hélène Grimaud as the piano soloist, looking as French movie star as ever. She's a controversial musician because she plays with composers' phrasing and rhythms, but that's also what makes her fabulous as a live performer. You're never quite sure what you are going to hear. (For a fascinating 2011 New Yorker profile of the pianist by D.T. Max, click here.)

Though I do not have synesthesia like Grimaud, where music translates into visual colors, the concerto's soundscape was so colorful that hues were popping up in my brain throughout the performance. Grimaud gave a virtuoso performance and followed up with an encore by Valentin Silvestrov, a composer Grimaud is currently championing.

The second half of the program was devoted to Gabriel Fauré's 1890 Requiem, and at the entrance of the embattled SF Symphony Chorus, the audience rose in support and applause.

Fauré was an interesting working musician, toiling as a church organist, music teacher, and finally the head of the Paris Conservatoire where he was a progressive, nurturing mentor to Ravel, among other composers. His Requiem is an early work from his church organist days where he seemingly became sick of all the fire and brimstone Latin mass settings, and wrote a gentle choral work that emphasizes the opening lines "Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis (Give them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them)."

Though the 40-minute mass is virtually all choral music, with a small orchestra, there are a couple of soloists who appear briefly. In these performances, it was soprano Liv Redpath and bass-baritone Michael Sumuel, who were both fine.

The chorus sounded a bit too forceful in some of the more delicate moments of the score, but they convincingly took the audience to heaven in the final movement, In Paradisum, where they sang "Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat (May a Chorus of angels welcome you)."