United States Muzik, Prokofiev, Stravinsky: Daniil Trifonov (piano), San Francisco Symphony / Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor). Davies Symphony Corridor, San Francisco, 21.2.2025. (HS)
Xavier Muzik – Unusual Beasts (San Francisco Symphony Fee and world premiere)
Prokofiev – Piano Concerto No.2
Stravinsky – The Ceremony of Spring
San Francisco Symphony served up a hearty live performance Friday night in Davies Symphony Corridor. There was so much to chew on: a world premiere, a gripping The Ceremony of Spring and, particularly, soloist Daniil Trifonov harnessing Prokofiev’s ultra-challenging Piano Concerto No.2.
All three items had been designed to make massive impressions. The Concerto No.2 and Ceremony famously challenged listeners’ ears on first listening to, though Stravinsky’s ballet rating now attracts audiences relatively than repelling them. Xavier Muzik’s Unusual Beasts, a San Francisco fee, match that mildew too, its outsized orchestra thundering with gritty harmonies and an intent to mirror the composer’s anxiousness.
Muzik was the 2023 winner of the Michael Morgan Prize from the Rising Black Composers Challenge, a joint initiative of the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The composer, who studied at Mannes College of Music in New York with Jessie Montgomery and Timo Andres, additionally dabbles in images, and his photos that includes towering buildings in Los Angeles had been projected on a display above the orchestra, coordinated with the rhythms of the music.
He wrote the piece whereas dwelling in Los Angeles, the place the large buildings downtown struck him as looming monsters. They triggered his personal ‘anxieties and catastrophic considering’, as he described it in an attractive pre-performance speak, which he discovered oddly comforting. I’m not sure that the photographs (which quickly flicked previous) enhanced or distracted from the music itself, however the mixture received over a full viewers.
The 17-minute tone poem rumbles, bumps into itself, and sometimes soars with elation. He clearly has command of the instrumentation, which splashes a wide range of colours and textures. The music rises and falls in waves. Softer sections generally really feel like respites and, at different instances, as merely eerie. Climaxes, of which there are lots of, can assault the ears with dissonance, however they all the time give method to some decision. It ends on a wispy, evanescent clarinet lick.
Greater than a century previous, the Prokofiev piano concerto and Ceremony premiered inside months of one another in 1913. Each embraced a degree of fierceness and unleashed dissonance that earned combined evaluations for Prokofiev and provoked a well-known riot for Stravinsky’s uncooked, rhythmically jolting rating in its first listening to in Paris. Prokofiev’s unique rating was destroyed in a hearth after the 1917 revolution, however he reconstructed it and up to date it from reminiscence for its 1924 re-premiere, additionally (maybe not coincidentally) in Paris.
Regardless of the historical past, the concerto presents a formidable problem to any soloist. Trifonov, all enterprise on the keyboard, grasped the music and ran with it, delivering a masterful, energizing, dazzling whirlwind of a efficiency. Esa-Pekka Salonen harnessed the large orchestra in sync with Trifonov, seamlessly connecting the orchestra’s rhythms to the soloist. The brass and percussion interjections pushed the momentum briskly.
The outsized cadenza within the opening Andantino, which additionally serves as the event, surged with ardour, all ringing chords adorned with clouds of crystal-like pianistic thrives. The sarcastic Scherzo got here by means of as a perpetual-motion zinger, and the Intermezzo countered with deliberately heavy-handed rhythms. Trifonov’s supply of the Finale lived as much as its marking, Allegro tempestoso, aggressive fortissimos and wistful lullabies. The ending was particularly pungent because the piano tapered to a pianissimo earlier than the orchestra crashed in with the ultimate recapitulation.
The encores had been, if something, much more participating. First, the second motion Allegro vivace e leggero from Barber’s Piano Sonata recalled the clouds of pianistic flourish from the Prokofiev concerto’s Intermezzo. Then got here the snarky Gavotte from Prokofiev’s Cinderella ballet, within the composer’s personal transcription for his ‘Three Items from Cinderella’. The purpose was additionally made that Barber’s harmonies and pianistic thrives had been typically not so removed from Prokofiev’s.
In The Ceremony of Spring, Salonen and the orchestra couldn’t have been extra alert to particulars, all of the whereas revving up the depth of expression. A bonus was the debut of the orchestra’s new principal bassoon, Joshua Elmore, whose résumé lists principal bassoonist of each the Fort Value Symphony and the Chineke! Orchestra (an ensemble made up completely of Black and minority ethnic musicians, based mostly in London). He received’t formally fill the currently-empty place in San Francisco till late March, however the alternative to fit him in for what definitely qualifies as essentially the most well-known bassoon solo ever qualifies as high-level serendipity.
Elmore’s lyric, polished, deftly phrased efficiency of the opening measures was a mannequin of sonic magnificence, and it set the tone for an exhilarating tour of the music. Salonen’s fluid gestures in the course of the Introduction painted a sinuous pasture, and his energetic conducting of the offbeat rhythms of Harbingers of Spring targeted completely on the accented beats relatively than the straight-ahead 2/4 by which the music is written. Clearly, he was after a extra free-wheeling really feel, at the same time as he aimed for (and succeeded in) getting all the main points proper.
Balances throughout the orchestra had been stunningly achieved, essentially the most complicated music layered so nicely that the whole lot was audible. Crucial voices emerged with out pressure. Softer, extra relaxed moments allowed for much-needed respiration room, comparable to Spring Rounds and Mystic Circles of the Younger Ladies, but nonetheless in some way pointing to the following propulsive part. Solo efforts, particularly devices less-often-featured comparable to alto flute (Blair Francis Paponiu), English horn (Russ de Luna) and E-flat clarinet (Matthew Griffith), painted a wide range of wanted colours.
As standard, timpanist Edward Stephan was on the heart of the rhythmic pleasure. The entire brass part, together with a row of 9 French horns (two doubling on Wagner tubas), introduced their A-game.
Harvey Steiman
