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.