SFS/Salonen: Hindemith, Muhly, Bach/Elgar

 

Davies Symphony Hall in Blue

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Taken the week of MTT's last SFS subscription concerts

I saw the second of two performances of what turned out to be the first subscription concert of Esa-Pekka Salonen's last year as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. He got a giant round of applause at the beginning and another at the end. However disposable the Board of Governors and management think he is, the audience does not agree. We'd really prefer to keep him, though why he would even consider sticking around when he's been treated so shabbily by the board and management, I don't know.

Anyway, it was a kind of wild program, built around sorta-Baroque and Baroque-adjacent music. The theoretical big work on the program was Nico Muhly's new piano concerto, a Symphony commission, played by pianist Alexandre Tharaud. Apparently Muhly had something of an obsession with the pianist and his recordings, and this concerto seems to be the result. It's Baroque-adjacent because Muhly used Baroque forms and melodies as his inspiration, with references to Rameau scattered around.

I found it lightweight, though with some charms, sort of Philip Glass crossed with Music From the Hearts of Space. Muhly's concerto has some nice touches in the orchestration; the piano is discreet, actually too discreet for my taste. I like the piano in a new concerto to be more present than this piano part is. And I have to admit: my initial reaction to the opening two minutes was to wonder why we were hearing outtakes from a Harry Potter movie.

The sorta-Baroque works were Edward Elgar's orchestration of J.S. Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C minor and Hindemith's Ragtime (Well-Tempered). The Elgar orchestration is something, setting a full late-romantic orchestra loose on the Bach, with Elgar claiming in a letter that surely this is the kind of thing Bach would have wanted had an early 20th c. orchestra been available to him and you know, I think that's nonsense (we cannot read the minds of people who've been dead since 1750, or even 1950), but I love transcriptions for their imagination and sometimes sheer cheekiness. I mean, if Bach had written for trombones and the tambourine, it probably wouldn't have sounded anything like the way that Elgar incorporates them into his transcription. BUT it was a ton of fun to hear how Elgar imagines updated Bach, and the different instrumental timbres made it easy to hear the counterpoint in the fugue. Salonen and the orchestra played it with dignity and noble sound, and it was good to hear.

The four-minute Ragtime (should it be played on a program with Stravinsky's Ragtime some time? Of course it should.) was a firecracker of an opener that left me wanting more, and at the end of the program, I got it in the form of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Painter) Symphony. It's three episodes drawn from Hindemith's opera Mathis der Mahler, which is about the German painter Matthias Grünewald and his struggles in the early 16th century.

I will never understand why, exactly, more Hindemith isn't performed in the United States. I have at least half-concluded that early 20th c. German music isn't of interest here unless it was written by Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, or Anton Webern. You don't hear much Schmidt, Schmitt, Hindemith (unless you have played one of his multitudinous works for solo orchestra instrument), Shrecker, Zemlinsky, etc. Hindemith was an enormously skilled composer who seemingly wrote for every instrument and every combination of instrument. Probably what he needs is a champion.

Esa-Pekka Salonen led a great performance of the Mathis der Mahler Symphony. I wasn't taking notes and don't have a lot to say other than that it's a big, serious work and it got a suitably grand and serious performance. I have to wonder whether the Muhly felt lightweight in part because of what followed it. 

Elsewhere (check back to see whether Joshua Kosman weighs in on this program)(he did):

• Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle, liked the Muhly a lot more than I did, so now I'd like to hear it again.
• Rebecca Wishnia, SFCV (and the SF Chronicle). I'll note that while a passacaglia can often be a lament (see "When I am laid in earth"), they're often instrumental (see the last movement of the Brahms 4th symphony). The usual definition is something like "a work with variations over a repeating bass line."
• Michael Strickland, SF Civic Center
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