Esa-Pekka Times Three

People I know were delighted when they learned, a couple of years ago, that Esa-Pekka Salonen had agreed to take over the leadership of the San Francisco Symphony. I too would have been delighted if I had known then what I know now: that he is one of the finest conductors working in the world today. I discovered this for myself at the first of three recent concerts he gave with the SFS, and that impression was only confirmed and amplified at the subsequent two.

All three concerts—held on June 18, June 25, and July 9—had a similar format. As is common these days, they lasted an hour and a half or less, without intermission. Audience members were required to wear masks, and a number of the orchestra members wore masks too, though in declining numbers as the summer progressed. Each concert consisted of three works: a short opening number employing a small number of musicians; a somewhat lengthier or more difficult second piece; and a substantial final composition that used the full orchestra. But the works selected were different enough that the structure never felt repetitive. And starved as we are for live music these days, each concert was like a generously full meal.

On June 18, Salonen opened with Richard Strauss’s 1881  Serenade in E-flat major, a piece for thirteen wind instruments, and went on to the very recent Be Still by Daniel Kidane, a pandemic-era tone poem involving strings alone. It was a lovely way of pointing out similarities and contrasts—between modes of expression, between historical periods, between kinds of sonority. He followed this up with Brahms’s rousing violin concerto, a piece I never tire of hearing. (Come to think of it, I never tire of hearing Brahms, period, though I always forget to rank him among my favorite composers.) This time the solo part was beautifully played by Augustin Hadelich, a marvelously expressive, slightly odd violinist I’d never heard before. As Esa-Pekka pointed out in a friendly, witty welcome to the audience, just feeling the sound of a live orchestra playing the Brahms was enough to restore our spirits in these difficult times.

The June 25 concert followed the same contrasting pattern in the first two pieces. An all-brass selection from Gabrieli’s late-sixteenth-century Sacrae symphoniae (in which the musicians, gratifying, performed from both sides of the balconies over the stage) was followed by Richard Strauss’s all-strings Metamorphosen from 1944. This late Strauss work was much longer and more challenging than the previous week’s early Strauss had been, as if Salonen were saying to us, Okay, last time we were taking baby steps in our return to musical attentiveness; now I’m going to make you work a little. He ended the evening with a full-length symphony, Schumann’s Symphony No. 3. This is not a piece I ever listen to on my own, but played live by the this orchestra, it was thrilling. As I commented to my companion that night, it’s not just the audience that’s going wild over Esa-Pekka; the musicians of the SFS, in response to his inspiring presence, seem to be playing better than they ever have before.

And last night we got Salonen at his own peak performance level. The program itself had a slightly different shape, with a very short and quiet opener—Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s Bist due bei mir—followed by the very substantial Mozart Clarinet Concerto. That was clearly intended as the crowd-pleaser of the evening, the work that would draw in an audience, and the SFS’s principal clarinetist, Carey Bell, did an unimpeachable job in the solo. If I sound less than fully enthusiastic, it’s because I’ve maybe heard this piece too many times, including from the great Richard Stolzman, and so my standards are ridiculously high—but, as predicted, the rest of the audience went wild over it.

The work that unexpectedly grabbed me, though, was Sibelius’s extraordinary Symphony No. 2. In its four movements, lasting three quarters of an hour, it went through nearly every color and mood available to a symphonic composition, from the near-silent throbbing of pizzicato on the basses alone, at the beginning of the second movement, to the full-force blast of the entire orchestra, underlaid by a brilliant drummer, at the end. It was suspenseful and moving and at times almost terrifying, and Esa-Pekka and the orchestra gave it everything they had. It was as if he had turned them all into proud, culturally attuned Finns, at least for the duration of the performance.

Watching him up there on the podium, and then listening to the outpouring of love that came to him from the nearly full audience, I realized once again how lucky we are to have this conductor in San Francisco. His presence here is a gift to us, and to the musicians, and to music itself.