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.