Dessner / Schubert / Beethoven at San Francisco Symphony

"Eternal Notes" for Dia de los Muertos

by Fernando Escartiz

Seen at Davies Hall on Friday, October 22, 2021.

This week, SFS presented the U.S. (and obviously local) premiere of Bryce Dessner's new violin concerto. Dessner is one of Esa-Pekka Salonen's collaborative partners, and so is the Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, who played the solo part.

Holy cow! If this is the kind of thing that we can look forward to from the collaborative partners, wow wow and more wow. The piece itself is grand; it incorporates stylistic nods to vernacular fiddle music and to the western classical concerto tradition (three connected movements with a dramatic cadenza); it's very very colorful, to the point that I could not figure out how certain sonorities were produced; the solo part is wildly demanding.

Kuusisto, who looks like a highly animated owl on stage, played this thing flawlessly, as far as I could tell. He is a wonderful player! (And here I want to nod to Claire Chase, also a collaborative partner, who played Kaija Saariaho's flute concerto Aile du Songe splendidly last week. Would be something to see these two great musicians together.)

Joshua Kosman has a longer description of the violin concerto in his review, where said this about the Schubert 5th that occupied the second half of the program:

After intermission, though, Salonen and the orchestra offered a weirdly genteel and bloodless account of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, all lace doilies and tiresome good manners. After the eruptive fervor of Dessner’s concerto, this landed as a limply ineffectual conclusion.

There are a bunch of things going on here. One is that the Schubert was on this program at all. It was not a particularly good choice to accompany the exciting, flamboyant, and colorful Dessner, to start with. 

It makes sense only because the orchestra has played a ton of music new to them, or rarely performed by them, in the last few weeks. The works new to SFS included the Dessner, Unsuk Chin's Graffiti, and Hannah Kendall's Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama. The orchestra last played Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques in 2010. I have not checked out the works that appeared on opening weekend.

So they have spent a lot of time rehearsing this stuff, and there's only so much rehearsal time in a week. It's not a big surprise that a comparatively short, uncomplicated, and familiar work was programmed in there someplace -- although, of course, SFS has played Beethoven's 7th innumerable times and did a great job with it two weeks ago. And maybe there are other easy-to-rehearse works that would have gone better with the Dessner (I would enjoy hearing your candidates!).

I thought last night's Schubert okay, if not great. I found Salonen's interpretive choices mostly defensible. The scherzo was distinctly dull; it should have been faster and more mysterious. The whole work would have sounded better with a larger orchestra and gutsier conducting and playing, for sure. Maybe it was better than Thursday. But I'm pretty sure that in this case, the context contributed a lot to how Joshua reacted to it (and it could have been a lot worse on Thursday).

(Oh, yeah, the Beethoven was the third (thanks, Mike!) second Leonore overture, which opened the program. Best thing about it was the 10 second solo by Mark Inouye (I presume), from somewhere waaaaay up in the hall.)