An Interview with James Gaffigan

James Gaffigan has been the Associate Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony for the last three years and it was announced recently that this season would be his final one in that role because he was moving on to bigger and better things in his career. This week he is conducting his last subscription concerts with the orchestra in a program that includes an obscure Haydn symphony, the local premiere of Thomas Ades' 2005 violin concerto, and my favorite Mozart symphony, No. 39.



I stumbled across Gaffigan at a summer pops concert in 2007 where he took Mozart's hackneyed, overplayed "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" and made it sound freshly minted. This is a rarer accomplishment than you'd imagine. I've been following most of his local appearances in San Francisco ever since, from a terrible "Latin" pops program in Dolores Park where gale force winds were knocking over the music stands, to a recent Shostakovich First Symphony at Davies Hall that was smashing in an altogether better way. (Click here for a link to the seven posts about Gaffigan over the last two years.) I asked the symphony if I could interview James for a few minutes about his plans for the future, particularly in opera, where he's slated to conduct the Mozart/DaPonte trilogy with "Don Giovanni" in Aspen, "Cosi Fan Tutti" at the legendary Glyndebourne Festival, and "The Marriage of Figaro" for the Houston Opera.



The ten-minute interview in the empty Davies Hall lobby turned into a freewheeling forty-five minute talk about the music world and it simply confirmed what I already suspected, which is that the 29-year-old Gaffigan is both ridiculously smart and charming. He was also surprisingly frank and honest.

My first question was how he learned to conduct Mozart so strikingly well, and he replied, "I just got it immediately, the first time I heard his music." The New York City based Gaffigan came "late" to classical music at the age of 14, after starting off wanting to be a rock and jazz guitarist. His instrument at the Juilliard School Prep Division was the bassoon, "because I loved the sound of it, plus it was Frank Zappa's instrument which made it cool." Seated in the student orchestra with all the other instruments surrounding him opened a world of wonder, and he soon started conducting new pieces composed by fellow students "because nobody else wanted to do that particular job." Since that time, he has made his way through a number of schools, music festivals such as Tanglewood, and been assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. He's been honing his craft and the rest of the world has started to notice as he's making debuts with everybody from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.



I asked him what he would love to conduct in an ideal world where he had all the choices, and his eyes lit up. "Ah, 'Otello' at La Scala, 'Elektra' at the Vienna State Opera, the Brahms Symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic, anything big from the late Romantic repertory with the Cleveland Orchestra." How about singers he'd like to work with? "Karita Mattila, just saw her in 'Salome' at the Met and was blown away, Fritz Wunderlich if he was alive, Measha Brueggergosman, Ian Bostridge, Sasha Cooke, Elza van den Heever." Who are his favorite composers, dead and alive? "Debussy, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, Britten, and for living composers Thomas Ades and Marc-Andre Dalbavie." Verdi or Wagner, I asked him, and he gave me a grin acknowledging this was still a minefield. "Verdi. I understood his music directly the first time I heard it. The second act of 'Tristan,' though, is some of the most amazing music ever written and the more I listen to it the more fascinating it is," and he held forth on chromatic strains to my delight and incomprehension for the next five minutes.



He's probably asked "How is the classical music world going to attract younger audiences?" in every other interview, so I didn't bother, but he offered the interesting observation that it's hip right now among young people to be educated and sophisticated. "Single malt scotch is in, and so is classical music. You don't have to dumb it down. Even though it's a scary time in terms of the economy, this is also a really exciting time to be in the classical music world."

The opening performance of this week's concert last night was great, and there are repeats this Thursday afternoon at 2PM, Friday at 6:30 PM, and Saturday at 8PM. I can't recommend his conducting of Mozart's Symphony #39 highly enough and the program doesn't seem to be selling all that well so there were $20 rush seats available Wednesday and Thursday, and there will probably be some available on Friday and Saturday. Call (415) 503-5577 on the day of performance to find out, and check out a future superstar while he's still young.

Ray Chen and James Gaffigan at the SF Symphony

This weekend's San Francisco Symphony concerts were a mixed bag. It began with conductor James Gaffigan leading the orchestra in the 2016 Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by the talented 44-year-old American composer, Missy Mazzoli. This wondrous, ten-minute piece was making its SF Symphony debut, and it actually sounded like the cosmos spinning, no mean feat. I hope it becomes a concert opener staple.

This was followed by violin soloist Ray Chen playing the 1940 Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber. Even though it's an often-performed standard, I wasn't familiar with the work at all, so went to YouTube and listened to a performance featuring violinist Joshua Bell. "That music sure is dull," my spouse commented. "Let's try this version with Ray Chen, who we'll be seeing tonight," I replied. By the end, the jury agreed, "This is a gorgeous piece of music." (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

The performance on Thursday's opening night was hard-charging, which seemed at odds with the gentleness of the first two movements, but it was an interesting approach that made the piece sound more anguished than meditative. The problem was that Gaffigan had the orchestra playing too loudly, drowning out Chen at various climactic moments. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

Chen's performance, however, was flawless, bringing out the pathos of the Andante movement, and reveling in the pyrotechnics of the final Presto movement.

Chen addressed the audience before playing an encore. Born in Taiwan, raised in Australia, and until recently living in Philadelphia, Chen announced that he had just moved to California, which prompted applause from the audience. "Unfortunately, I just settled in Los Angeles, and I'm in a state of shock right now" on account of the fires currently destroying the city. "This piece fits my mood right now," he continued, before playing Eugène Ysaÿe's Obsession from his Violin Sonata No. 2. Starting with a J.S. Bach quote, it's a wild, knotty piece that felt fitting.

The second half of the concert was dedicated to Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, a triumphant 45-minute hymn to Mother Russia at the end of World War Two. After Gaffigan's "rather vigorous conducting" (as my London seatmate put it) of the Barber concerto, I was worried about Gaffigan's approach to the Prokofiev symphony, which already leans toward incoherent bombast, particularly its long first movement. The worry was fitting because the performance sounded like Gaffigan was trying to see how fast and how loud he could have the orchestra play, with hardly any modulation or quiet moments. Hearing the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony can be a great, exciting experience, but by the end of this concert I felt bludgeoned. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

The Return of James Gaffigan at the SF Symphony

After the Women's March two Saturdays ago, we went to Davies Hall to hear guest conductor James Gaffigan lead the San Francisco Symphony. Gaffigan was the associate conductor of the orchestra from 2006 and 2009 before launching an international career based mostly out of Europe. I was a big fan when he was the associate, particularly in his handling of Mozart with the SF Symphony, so I went into the Saturday concert with high hopes which were met and exceeded in a marvelous range of Russian and Austrian music.



The concert started with Mussorgsky's original orchestration for A Night on Bald Mountain from 1867. I like most of Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestrations of Mussorgsky's music, which are big and plush and smooth, but the composer's originals are generally weirder, starker, and more interesting. This newly rediscovered version, published for the first time in 1968, was no exception. The orchestra gave a rich, colorful performance of familiar music that sounded brand new.



This was followed by Prokofiev's 1935 Violin Concerto No. 2, written while he was bouncing around from the U.S. to France to Russia and elsewhere around the globe. Even though I know and love much of Prokofiev's music, this is a major piece I had somehow never heard before, and it has become an instant favorite. Listening to different versions on YouTube (the favorite was an old recording with violinist David Oistrakh, pictured above playing chess with Prokofiev), the piece became an enchanting earworm. After a brilliant first movement, the Andante revolves around one of the sweetest, simplest melodies Prokofiev ever wrote, and the final movement is a demonic corker with motoric, dissonant thrusts of the violin embroidered with castanets, in a nod to Madrid where the concerto premiered.



The young Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma above was the soloist, and the performance was as good or better as any of the recorded versions on YouTube, not to mention that hearing this live makes all the difference. Balancing Prokofiev's competing rhythms between soloist and orchestra in this concerto is a tricky business, and Gaffigan got it just right.



After intermission, the orchestra performed Mozart's Symphony No. 36, which the composer whipped out on commission in four days. It's odd how many conductors go astray with Mozart but Gaffigan seems to have an instinctive affinity for his music, and the musicians responded with a lively performance.



The real surprise of the concert was the finale, the Dance of the Seven Veils from Richard Strauss's opera, Salome. I have never heard the huge orchestra sound this good with the music of Strauss, with a clarity that sounded like Christian Thielemann conducting Elektra at the SF Opera in the early 1990s. If Gaffigan can make an overplayed pops piece like the Dance of the Seven Veils sound this magnificent, imagine what he could do with a whole opera. Please, San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Opera, invite him back.

James Gaffigan Conducting the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony continued with their semi-post-pandemic concerts at Davies Hall last Thursday. The lobby is empty, everyone wears masks, and you need proof of vaccination to sit in the orchestra section. At this point, only strings and percussion are allowed onstage because wind instruments, including voices, are designed to blow air outwards.

One of my favorite conductors, James Gaffigan, was on the podium introducing his program that started with Talisman by a young British composer, Freya Waley-Cohen, followed by Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, and finished off with Barber's perennial Adagio for Strings.

I listened to Talisman a couple of times on YouTube (click here) and couldn't make heads or tails of the piece written for 13 strings. Often a live performance will make a new piece more audibly legible, but that wasn't the case and the fault was probably mine. Kosman at the SF Chronicle appreciated it and so did my concert companion, remarking that he loved the delicacy of the sounds made by the 13 players each doing their own thing. (The photo above and all those following are by Kristen Loken.)

The meat of the program was Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written for a string sextet in 1899 at the beginning of the composer's career, and expanded for a string orchestra in 1917. The work is High German/Austrian Romantic, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel about a couple in the dark woods where the woman confesses ""I am carrying a child, and not by you." In the second half, the man accepts and exalts the situation out of transcendent love. Before the musical performance, Cassandra Hunter recited an English translation of the poem with grace.

Gaffigan explained that they were going to be projecting the poem at its various musical moments on supertitle screens. "And if you hate that, don't look at it," he advised. I didn't know the famous work at all and appreciated the titles which were useful markers for the densely chromatic, sensual music as it made its way to a rapturous finale.

Though Barber's Adagio for Strings is a staple of classical music radio stations and movie soundtracks, this may have been my first live performance. Gaffigan kept the schmaltz factor to a minimum, building clearly and deliberately to the emotional climax. His conducting and evident joy in his string ensemble felt like a burst of sheer energetic joy all evening.

These concerts are continuing on Thursday and Friday evenings for five more weeks, and the SF Symphony just announced that on account of changes in the pandemic regulations for San Francisco on June 15th, the final two concerts conducted by new Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen will feature the entire orchestra, including brass instruments, in performances of Brahms' Violin Concerto and Schumann's Symphony No. 3.

Gaffigan at the SF Symphony

I've been crushing on conductor James Gaffigan since 2007 when I stumbled across him at an SF Symphony Summer in the City pops concert (link here). He was MTT's assistant for three years before taking on the rest of the world for the last decade, with posts in Lucerne and the Netherlands and gigs at every major opera house globally. San Francisco Opera is currently looking for a Music Director and Gaffigan is one of a few being auditioned there later this year with productions. On a purely selfish level, I hope he gets the job so I can hear him more. He's one of those special characters who has music in their fingertips.

This afternoon's concert, with Gaffigan as guest conductor, started with a Wagnerian Good Friday Music from Parsifal overture. Following was a performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, which I've always thought of as "the pretty one." The soloist was Hélène Grimaud who gave a flawless performance in terms of accuracy, but which was surprisingly dull, undifferentiated, and unmusical.

Meanwhile, the orchestra under Gaffigan sounded vastly more interesting in their background interjections, and I kept wishing we were hearing that version of the concerto. Sometimes having a soloist and an orchestra going separate ways can be intriguing, but not in this case.

The second half of the program was Mozart's Symphony #31, which he wrote at the age of 22, and Samuel Barber's Symphony #1 which he wrote at age 26 in 1936. Gaffigan is a Mozart lover who conducts Amadeus' music with a wonderful mixture of pleasure and understanding. The major revelation of the afternoon was the Barber Symphony, which he conducted in a great performance by the orchestra as if it were an undiscovered Sibelius-influenced masterpiece. I've been disappointed lately by every Barber piece I've heard at the Symphony over the last decade, but today was a happy corrective. And the brass section was a perfect blast.

Verdi's Requiem at the SF Symphony

The 2024-2025 SF Symphony season was scheduled to begin last fall with music for chorus and large orchestra by Gordon Getty (pictured above) and Verdi's Requiem. However, it was canceled at the last moment because management was threatening draconian cuts to the paid members of the Symphony Chorus and when there was pushback, management canceled the concerts. Nine months later, the concert was rescheduled with conductor James Gaffigan replacing the recently departed Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who had his own issues with SF Symphony management.

I wrote a mean assessment of Gordon Getty ten years ago (click here) when the SF Opera presented his one-act The Fall of the House of Usher in 2015. In an older, more forgiving mood, let's just say that I am happy he donates so much money to musical institutions locally. That money probably helped to subsidize the Verdi Requiem performance Sunday afternoon that followed twenty minutes of Getty's three songs for chorus and orchestra with poetry written by the composer himself. He was even kind enough to pose for a photo with my spouse.

The Friday evening opener received mixed reviews from Michael Zwiebach and Joshua Kosman, but something came together two days later for a truly magnificent performance on Sunday afternoon. (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The four soloists were soprano Rachel Willis-Sorensen, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, tenor Mario Chang, and bass Morris Robinson, and they were all in great voice which presumably was not the case on Friday evening.

Though I worship Verdi, I had never connected with his Requiem in a live performance before. It had always sounded overlong, bombastic, and dull in its quieter moments, but on Sunday afternoon everything clicked. Conductor James Gaffigan leaned into the operatic nature of the work and led a gripping rendition of of the mass's 90 minutes of meditation on heaven and hell. It was one of the best performances I have heard from him with this orchestra in some time.

It also helped that the soloists were so good. The voice of mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, in particular, carried over the huge orchestra and chorus while sounding like creamy butter, and Morris Robinson's bass was powerful enough that it sounded like he could personally open the gates of heaven or hell.

The chorus, saved from penury by an anonymous donor at the beginning of the season, was superb throughout, with a dynamic range from soft to loud that was remarkable.

Congratulations to everyone for making me fall in love with Verdi's Requiem for the very first time.

Gaffigan and Denk at Summer in The City

The San Francisco Symphony hosts an annual series called "Summer in The City" that has always had an air of absurdity since it invariably starts on the foggiest San Francisco summer day imaginable.



This doesn't stop management from putting up pictures of sunshine and colorful balloons and so on in the Davies Symphony Hall lobby which only makes the shivering audience look even stranger.



The programming is also rather bizarre, with half of the dozen concerts using the symphony as backup for ancient pop stars such as Neil Sedaka, Johnny Mathis and Patti Lupone. The other half of the concerts are usually a traversal of overplayed, classical warhorses in underrehearsed performances conducted by the Symphony's assistant conductor for noisy, casual audiences.



The only reason I attended on Friday evening was to hear the young pianist Jeremy Denk as soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto #23 because I have been reading his witty, beautifully written blog for the last month and wanted to check him out (click here to get to "Think Denk").



Still, I was dreading the actual concert since it started with one of Mozart's most overplayed pieces, "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," continued with the aforementioned piano concerto and ended with Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and I was expecting the evening to be sloppy, dull and deadly.



Imagine my total and utter amazement, if you will, when after the first movement of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" ended, I joined the spontaneous applause of half the audience for the new Associate Conductor James Gaffigan, who is 27 years old but who looks to be about 15. He was conducting the music as if it was brand new and was the freshest, most exciting stuff around and the feeling was infectious.



In the Bay Area in the 1970s there was a prodigiously talented young conductor named Calvin Simmons who conducted Mozart with the same youthful love and passion before he suffered an untimely death in a boat accident in the early 1980s, and I haven't heard Mozart's music sound quite so alive since that time.



In fact, about halfway through the piano concerto, which was played with wonderful accuracy and a keen attention to his fellow players by Jeremy Denk, I burst into tears and didn't stop until the piece was over. It sounded both perfect and spontaneous, and I can't remember the last time I heard Mozart in Davies Symphony Hall sounding that way.



At intermission I ran to the side of the hall for a rendezvous with a wonderful marketing woman at the symphony named Louisa, who had set up a photo shoot with Jeremy Denk backstage before he tore off to the airport for a flight home to New York City.



The photos turned out a little crappy (he's better looking in real life), and I felt like a fool gushing to somebody who was slightly dazed from his just-completed performance onstage, but it was a pleasure meeting the virtuoso.



The Beethoven #7 in the second half was conducted by Gaffigan at an insanely fast clip with spiky rhythms that wouldn't have been out of place in Prokofiev. Though I'd rather not hear the piece played this way all the time, the performance was fun, dynamic and genuinely sensational, with new things in the music I'd never heard before which didn't seem possible. There is a free concert at Dolores Park at 4PM today (Sunday) with Gaffigan and the Symphony playing Falla's "The Three Cornered Hat" along with Piazzola tangos, which is highly recommended. There are also two different concerts this Wednesday and Thursday of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky warhorses that you might want to check out. Click here for the San Francisco Symphony website for tickets. Anybody who can make "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" interesting is obviously very special.

Gaffigan Redux at the SF Symphony

The SF Symphony presented a wildly eclectic program last week that was entertaining for a lot of reasons, but principally because Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas withdrew suddenly with illness and was replaced by conductor James Gaffigan who had been on the podium just last month. The original program was a lot of Debussy, which MTT was recording, along with Ligeti's Piano Concerto. Last-minute substitutions started with Saint-Saens' 1876 Bachanalle from Samson et Dalila. Reviewer Johua Kosman described the music "as cheesy and racist a collection of Orientalist hoochie-koochie as any composer of the 19th century ever penned." He's not wrong, but that opera and the Philistine Orgy scene in Act III in particular are favorite guilty pleasures, and Gaffigan obviously enjoys it too, leading a fun, dancing performance.

This was followed by some of the brainiest music imaginable, Ligeti's 1988 Piano Concerto, with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard who has been playing this concerto almost since its premiere. He gave an authoritative performance of difficult, oft-kilter music and seemed to be enjoying himself besides.

I went to the final performance on Saturday evening, and it was amusing watching the small chamber orchestra filled with principal players congratulating and hugging each other at the end of the five movements, partly just to have gotten through the difficult piece as well as they had. The first movement starts off with a deceptively jazzy tune that fractures into varying time signatures that start to sound like one of Nancarrow's multi-layered player piano pieces, except this was being performed by real people in real time. The second movement is slow, dark, Bartokian, that builds beautifully into piercing bursts of sound. The third through fifth movements were spare, complex, and strange, and I'd have to hear the music a bunch more to make any sense of it, but Ligeti is one of the few composers I always give the benefit of the doubt.

After intermission, there was an ode to the City of Detroit called Something for the Dark. Commissioned in 2016 by the Detroit Symphony from composer Sarah Kirkland Snider above, the 12-minute piece seemed to be one brass fanfare after another, interspersed with pretty music for a large orchestra. After the Ligeti, the piece sounded bizarrely old-fashioned, plush in sound and thin in invention.

The final piece was Debussy's 1905 tone poem about the sea, La Mer. The mixture of misty pointillism and bold Technicolor tunes makes it a tricky piece to pull off. Gaffigan managed to give both the delicacy and the bravado their due in the best live performance I have heard of this pictorial work. I finally heard all the different waves for the first time.