Esa-Pekka
Salonen has been conducting the Los Angeles
Philharmonic for 12 seasons, but these concerts
mark the first occasion for San Francisco
audiences to experience what all the excitement
in L.A. has been about. Salonen's debut in
front of the San Francisco Symphony this week
is actually the second half of a conductor
swap that saw Michael Tilson Thomas, at the
helm in San Francisco for 10 years now, leading
Salonen's orchestra for the first time last
fall in what by all accounts was a series
of memorable performances of Mahler's Symphony
No. 6.
Salonen
built a thoughtful and highly personal program
around his own 2002 composition, Insomnia.
The 22-minute work is a modern take on night
music, hardly the gentle nocturnes of Chopin.
As the name suggests, the music explores the
psychological waves, frights and disturbances
that keep one from sleeping. The theme and
variations form reflects perfectly the way
recurring versions of the same thoughts can
keep one from getting a night's rest.
The
highly programmatic piece begins with a chord
sequence enunciated by the woodwinds, each
phrase tied to the next with a quick flash
of melody -- a nice touch, just as if the
lull of near-sleep were being interrupted
by thoughts. These chords are the basis of
the variations that follow, including several
major interruptions of what Salonen calls
"machine music." These sequences remind me
of what Minimalist composers are so good at
-- creating a highly rhythmic pattern and
altering it subtly and repeatedly until it
ends up being something completely different.
But
Salonen is no Minimalist. His musical palette
is complex, polyphonic, multi-rhythmic, and
in this piece the assaults keep coming. The
musical language can have a hard edge but
mostly it's harmonically rich and devilishly
unpredictable. Each variation has its own
set of psychological demons to explore and
overcome until, finally, with thick, generous
chords in the low brass and woodwinds, a sense
of repose is reached -- just in time for a
blaze of dawn and the unmistakable jangling
of an alarm clock to bring a fast end to the
poor insomniac's sleep.
Salonen's
highly intelligent program choices all point
to various aspects of his own piece. Like
Insomnia, Mussorgsky's A Night on
Bald Mountain, which opened the program,
and Bartok's Suite from The Miraculous
Mandarin, which closed it, tell stories
that take place at night. The Mussorgsky piece
deals directly with a tale of witches and
demons, the Bartok with a ballet depicting
its title character, the victim of a sexual
set-up, dancing about and completing the sex
act despite being hanged. Lurid stuff, that.
The
other piece on the agenda was Prokofiev's
Piano Concerto No. 1, unusually for a sole
solo work placed after intermission (with
Insomnia preceding the break). The
piece's extensive use of ostinato (repeated
rhythmic phrases) echoes Salonen's "machine
music," which added more impact to the entire
program. Impact, actually, is the overriding
theme. Each of these pieces is boisterous,
loud and colorful.
Pianist
Yefim Bronfman has the technique to bestride
Prokofiev's big, broad moments and the musical
subtlety to bring a real sense of shape to
them. His playing and Salonen's energetic
conducting made the concerto something special.
Mussorgsky's
original orchestration of A Night on Bald
Mountain is darker, more bass-heavy than
the more familiar version re-orchestrated
by Rimsky-Korsakov (another parallel with
Salonen, who favors low brass and strings
in his orchestration for Insomnia).
The first piece on the concert revealed a
high level of communication between Salonen,
whose almost acrobatic baton technique isn't
at all like Tilson Thomas'. If there were
a quibble, it would be that Salonen couldn't
tease more clarity out of Mussorgsky's dense
orchestration here.
He
got it in the Bartok, however, which gleamed
and glittered in all its polychromatic glory.
Luis Baez delivered a properly debauched series
of clarinet solos and the whole percussion
section distinguished itself in seasoning
the rhythms with more color of their own.
One can sense in The Miraculous Mandarin
more than a little of Stravinsky's Rite
of Spring, which preceded Bartok's composition
by only a few years. The tonal language is
often harsh, but Salonen got some whacky humor
out of the score before ratcheting up the
dramatic intensity to breathtaking levels.
Harvey
Steiman
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