Rafael Payare at SFS

Rafael Payare

Photo by Benjamin Ealovega

Courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

Rafael Payare, who is the music director of the San Diego Symphony and of the Montreal Symphony, made his debut with San Francisco Symphony this week. He led the orchestra's first performances of William Grant Still's Darker America, Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, with soloist Bruce Liu, and Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben.

I'd never heard the Still before; it's a moody excursion into the world of Black Americans, for a smallish orchestra. To give you an idea, Mark Almond (French horn), Mark Inouye, and one of the trombonists were seated next to each other in the row where, I think, the clarinets and bassoons usually live. I wasn't taking notes and won't say much beyond that it was well played as far as I can tell.

The Beethoven was a late addition to the program; originally, Hilary Hahn was scheduled to play the Brahms violin concerto. A friend who heard Payare in Brahms at the LA Phil was favorably impressed, so I was particularly looking forward to this, but Hahn was taken ill and withdrew. Bruce Liu is a young Chinese-French-Canadian pianist, born to Chinese parents in Paris who relocated, eventually, to Canada. He won the Chopin competition a couple of years back.

The performance we heard I'd put into the "very good" bucket. Liu has a delicate touch of great clarity; nothing was messy or bangy or out of place. I found him restrained, with elegant phrasing; Payare matched this, with a small orchestra, and superb balance between the orchestra and piano. It was a more Mozartean performance than Beethovenian. I felt like I was hearing Mozart's 30th piano concerto rather than a work pointing to the grand scale of Beethoven's 4th and 5th piano concertos. It was a great distance from the epic performance put on in October, 2021 by Yefim Bronfman and Esa-Pekka Salonen -- and that's fine. A work like this is open to a multitude of interpretations.

Liu's encore was the "Tom Lehrer" version of Für Elise, by which I mean, you should think of what Lehrer did with "Darling Clementine". I heard scattered giggles when it started, and thought "Okay, no pro at this level plays that with a straight face, so what is he going to do with it?"

The big (BIG) work on the program was Ein Heldenleben. At 45 minutes, or so, with quadruple wind and a big string section, it is very very large scale. Have I heard it before? Maybe, but not live and not recently. As with much of Richard Strauss's music, it could easily become vulgar or exaggerated; in Payare's hands, it was anything but. The orchestra sounded magnificent; balances were astonishingly good (you could pretty much always hear the strings, who too often get buried); Payare's interpretation played the big moments for what they were, without exaggeration and with a good sense of restraint.  Payare's sense of dynamics is also superb; he built the performance from ppp up to maybe double forte, never overloading the hall and, again, keeping the orchestra well balanced. The intimate moments, and there are plenty of those, were glorious. 

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle
• No SFCV review, probably because they published a review of Payare's program at the LA Phil.