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.