The San Francisco Symphony Returns

[peekaboo]

The orchestra makes a dazzling comeback, thanks to loosened Covid-19 restrictions and an ambitious new music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen.

 

In a world afflicted by great loss over the past 15 months, there may be some who don’t much lament the long stifling endured by the performing arts. But for those multitudes who find incalculable reward in live performance, some recent stirrings in the Golden State prompt near exaltation.

Earlier this month, on June 6, Los Angeles Opera presented Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with an orchestra, chorus and soloists totaling 99, nearly half unmasked, before an audience of 675 in a moving and timely performance.

Now, up north, the San Francisco Symphony has jump-started the hitherto stalled inauguration of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s music directorship. Mr. Salonen’s tenure was to have begun last fall with a host of inventive programming and a much-touted partnership with eight cutting-edge cultural figures. But the pandemic thwarted those plans. Instead, the recently European-based Mr. Salonen has made an unexpected return to the U.S. to lead several programs throughout the summer that are neither part of the scrapped 2020-21 season nor an early start to the soon-to-be announced 2021-22 season.

The first bill, which belatedly marks Mr. Salonen’s public-performance debut as this orchestra’s music director, came last night and will be repeated this evening. It represents something considerably more than dipping a toe in familiar waters but less than full immersion. The initial program, subsequently changed, included Bach, Bernstein and the work of a rising British composer named Daniel Kidane. But as restrictions have ebbed—masked music lovers filled 946 of the 2,743 seats in Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday—the orchestra welcomed more of its members back to the stage, even as it meant sacrificing some of that original program’s novelty. And so Bach (“Brandenburg” Concerto No. 3) and Bernstein (his underrated “Serenade”) made way for Richard Strauss and Brahms, though Mr. Kidane’s “Be Still” and the program’s soloist, the estimable European-American violinist Augustin Hadelich, remained.

Mr. Kidane’s piece, receiving its American premiere, could hardly have been replaced, for as Mr. Salonen explained from the stage, “Be Still” was written in response to the pandemic, its first performance having occurred in January via live stream from Manchester, England. Scored almost completely for strings, the work is meditative but not inert. It tenses and relaxes repeatedly, until a twisted version of its theme asserts itself (a manifestation of our collective anxiety perhaps). A crescendo further destabilizes things. The coda comes as the first violinist enters into something of a duet with a nearby percussionist using a bow against crotales to summon the faintest tintinnabulations, until an abrupt silence brings the nine-minute work to a close. It may sound like a dig to say the music seemed to last longer on this occasion, but the observation is meant as a compliment.

It was preceded by Strauss’s Serenade in E-flat, Op. 7, for 13 wind instruments, including four of the French horns this composer so adored. Such juvenilia—he was just 17 when he wrote it—isn’t usually worth rehearing, but this work is an exception, a Mozartean confection that gorgeously blends varied timbres. Mr. Salonen led it with cool, elegant appeal, the balances remarkable given how long these players have been absent from one another’s company.

Normally, an intermission would have separated Brahms’s Violin Concerto from the rest of the program, but Covid-19 protocols still persist here. (Symphony rules also require masks for the string players and percussionists, though for how much longer remains unclear.) It brought together 55 members of the orchestra, the most yet allowed and the closest to pre-pandemic numbers.

That the gifted Mr. Hadelich was the soloist only made the moment dearer. His big tone was matched by his assertive temperament, yet he shaped his phrases carefully, even in a performance as outwardly defiant as this one was. The orchestra, sounding cohesive and powerful, complemented him fully. And it was a treat to have the violinist perform his own scintillating cadenzas. The slow second movement was especially touching, and the zippy finale combined frank optimism with an almost breathless quality. Following a well-earned, if predictable, standing ovation, Mr. Hadelich offered an unexpected solo encore, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s “Louisiana Blues Strut,” which he dispatched with no less authority than he gave the Brahms.

Mr. Salonen brings a similarly scaled program of Gabrieli, Strauss and Schumann to Davies on June 24 and 25, when restrictions on audience size will be completely eliminated. He continues in this mode in July, while dividing his concerts between indoor and outdoor venues. With September comes the new season and the likelihood of ever increasing flexibility in programming. Progress has been slow, and there have been reversals, yet the performing arts, here and elsewhere, are steadily reclaiming lost ground.