Anxious Music at the SF Symphony

Departing SF Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led a smashing concert over the weekend that included a commissioned world premiere and two major, banging works by Prokofiev and Stravinsky that were composed just before World War One. The concert started with Strange Beasts, the 20-minute commissioned piece by a young black composer, Xavier Muzik, pictured above. (All photos are courtesy of Kristen Loken.)

Muzik gave a sweet, rambling intro that repeated the program notes where he mentioned that he suffered from anxiety attacks, particularly during the COVID pandemic while living in Los Angeles, and that one of his solutions was to photograph the world around him. Some of those photos were used as part of a quirky multimedia slideshow of skyscrapers looming like Godzilla and what appeared to be claustrophobic gatherings of fans during an LA Dodgers World Series parade. What set the visuals apart from other symphonic multimedia shows I've encountered was that the images were intermittent, appearing during less than half of the course of the music, and they mostly stayed up for less than a second in an anxiety-producing strobe effect.

The music took a while to gain traction, but once it did, with a woodblock propulsively driving the huge orchestra along, it was intermittently engaging, and yes, anxious-making. From the looks of his website, this was Muzik's first big orchestra commission, and it was impressive how well he composed for the entire ensemble. I'd like to hear it again.

This was followed by the agonizingly slow Ascent of the Grand Piano from the basement, whereupon Daniil Trifonov stormed his way through Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2. Prokofiev composed the piece in 1912, fresh from the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 21, then lost the score in a fire before fleeing the Russian Revolution and literally traveling around the world for the next decade. He reconstructed the concerto from memory in Paris in 1923, and it's an insanely difficult, complex piece to play.

This was my first time seeing Trifonov play after reading about him over the last decade, and he didn't disappoint in terms of virtuosity and an idiosyncratic musical intelligence. However, he didn't seem to be doing the score many favors with some of his musical choices, and the concerto started to sound more wildly eccentric and unfocused than it actually is. In contrast, Yefim Bronfman played the same work with the SF Symphony in 2019 and it was such a perfecly calibrated performance that the audience applauded after each movement, usually a no-no, but in that case well deserved (click here).

Still, it was fascinating to see Trifonov in person, looking like one of those classical music "long-hairs" that were featured in movies from the 1920s onwards. And in his encore, where he played with a gentleness that was absent in most of the Prokofiev, he was exquisite.

After intermission, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Igor Stravinsky's still-shocking 1912 ballet score Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) in a brightly colored performance that had the orchestra playing at its best. It was also a delight to hear the new principal bassoon player, Joshua Elmore, playing the famous opening strains of the score.

Thanks to Disney's Fantasia, I long associated The Rite of Spring with dinosaurs stomping around, but the ballet is actually depicting the ritual sacrifice of a young woman. That's always anxious making.

Honk If You Hate Elon

On a #49 Muni bus this afternoon I sat next to a gentleman holding a homemade cardboard sign.

We were both on our way to a protest taking place in front of the Tesla showroom at 999 Van Ness.

The signage was mostly direct and to the point about the fascist coup currently taking place in the U.S. federal government...

...led by the malignant Trump and the ketamine-addled Elon Musk.

This was one of hundreds of protests taking place nationwide in front of Tesla dealerships...

...which is one prong of the rapidly building resistance to authoritarian rule by the racist, misogynist South African, Elon Musk.

Though the protest was serious, the crowd was joyous...

...which was brightened by a lively band that played continuously for two hours.

There was even a celebrity sighting of writer Rebecca Solnit (the Woman in Black) holding a #DefendDemocracy banner on a median strip in the middle of Van Ness Avenue. She's been an invaluable online presence since the January 20 inauguration, doing just that, defending democracy.

Shostakovich and Mahler at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony offered a meaty program this week that started with the Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein playing Shostakovich's 1957 Piano Concerto #2 in a buoyant, joyful performance. The work was written for Dmitri Shostakovich's son Maxim for his Conservatory final, and it's a delightful outlier in the composer's later compositions, sounding a bit like early Prokofiev.

The guest conductor was Estonian-American Paavo Järvi who matched the pianist in both the brightness of the outer movements and the meditative beauty of the Andante in the center.

Gerstein seemed to be having a ball playing the piece and he was brought back three times by the audience on Friday evening before playing an encore by Rachmaninoff, the Mélodie from his Salon Pieces.

After intermission, Järvi conducted a huge orchestra in Mahler's 1905 Symphony #7, a sprawling behemoth in five movements that is the least popular and performed among the composer's nine symphonies. Usually, the work lasts about 80 minutes but there's a recording by Otto Klemperer that is 100 minutes long and a recording by Hermann Scherchen that is 68 minutes long. Paavo Järvi's account was closer to the Scherchen, which worked well for the hard-driving first movement, but was less effective in the three "night music" movements in the middle, where the bright lights stayed on and there was no mystery or darkness. After a while, everything started to sound the same.

In any rendition, what is most remarkable about the symphony is how every instrument or grouping of instruments has its solo moments, as if this were a chamber work. At times, it sounded like The Old Person's Guide to the Orchestra (apologies, Benjamin Britten), and the various sections were sounding fabulous, including the trumpets led by principal Mark Inouye.

Also impressive were the contributions of all the wind instruments throughout, and the rondo finale where all heck breaks loose was a joy.

Stephen Hough Plays Liszt and Chopin

The 63-year-old British pianist Stephen Hough brought his formidable Liszt/Chopin sonata recital program to the Herbst Theater on Tuesday evening, sponsored by the invaluable San Francisco Performances. Hough is an official MacArthur Fellowship genius, a brilliant writer, a musical composer/arranger, a colorful painter, and above all a frighteningly accomplished pianist. He's also gay, a Catholic convert, and has often longed to be a priest or a Franciscan monk.

Hough sometimes champions overlooked 19th century composers, usually French, and this concert started with three piano pieces by Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944): Automne, Autre fois, and Les sylvains. Chaminade's style is reminiscent of Camille Saint-Saëns, and she was a prolific, accomplished composer whose music was demeaned both because of her gender and because her style went out of fashion once the 20th century arrived. The trio of works were all interesting and it would be great to hear more of her work.

This was followed by Franz Liszt's strange, craggy, monumental Piano Sonata in B Minor (1853), 30 minutes of uninterrupted piano drama that I had somehow never heard before. Hough's performance was loud and dramatic, which suited the music, and by the end of the performance a friend said, "My fingers started hurting just watching that."

I could have happily gone home fulfilled after the first half, but there was more after an intermission. Hough wrote a short, three-movement piece called Sonatina Nostalgica for an old friend's 70th birthday, evoking their shared childhood village of Lymm in Northwest England. This was the first time he spoke to the audience, describing the place and the piece, and it was also the only time he used a (digital) score while playing. Everything else on the program he had somehow memorized.

Bookending the Liszt, he finished with Chopin's final major work, the 1844 Piano Sonata No. 3 in B Minor. I still had the Liszt performance jangling in my brain so it was hard to concentrate on the Chopin. It started feeling like "too many notes," like the apocryphal story about Emperor Joseph II and Mozart.

There were two encores, the Warum movement from Schumann's Fantasiestücke and Hough's own insanely virtuosic fantasia on the Mary Poppins song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.