Okay, granted it’s been fifteen months since anyone in San Francisco was able to attend a live concert in Davies Symphony Hall. Granted that we were all starved for a real musical performance—not live-streaming, not carefully curated videos of past pinnacles, but real live musicians and audience members present in the same hall. And granted that we vaccinated recipients of this largesse felt like prisoners set free, returnees to a land we never thought we would see again.
All that is true, but none of it fully accounts for the absolute perfection of the concert that Jeremy Denk and a group of San Francisco Symphony string players gave on May 13th and 14th. I was present at the Friday night performance—which lasted exactly an hour and fifteen minutes without intermission—and I could feel and see my fellow audience members coming back to life in exactly the way I was. It reminded me of the way the flowers in my garden perk up when I give them a much-needed watering during a heat wave. We were all thirsting for something special, and Jeremy Denk quenched our thirst.
He did this by interspersing two brief, relatively modern works—William Grant Still’s 1939 Out of the Silence, and Gerald Finzi’s Eclogue for Piano and Orchestra, which dates vaguely from the second quarter of the twentieth century—with two longer masterpieces, Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major. The Finzi was not really to my taste (too soupy and romantic, I thought), but the eerie, floating piece by Still was a real discovery, and I was grateful to have heard it.
Of course, neither could compete with the main servings of the evening, nor were they meant to. But with Jeremy Denk’s excellent commentary before and between each piece, the smaller segments did their bit in contributing toward the feeling of the whole evening. That feeling involved a sense of discovery and rediscovery—of composers we’d never heard of, of old gems transformed in new hands, and of how even the art of conducting could take on surprising forms. Denk “conducted,” if that’s the right word, from his piano bench, barely moving his arms more than he would have in a normal piano performance, but nonetheless leading the other musicians. Obviously much of the true conducting was invisible to us, in the rehearsals that lay behind the live concert (and what I would have given to attend those rehearsals!). But even so, we had the sense of a strongly cohesive group—all on the same page, as it were—despite the extended distance between their seats and the face-masks that they were still obliged to wear.
We in the audience were also masked, and before entering we had been asked to show our vaccination certificates along with our I.D.s and digital tickets. But none of this interfered with our pleasure; if anything, it made us appreciate it more, because it reminded us of the hard times from which we are only starting to emerge. Denk’s conversation, too, alluded to these hard times, and to the privilege of being able to play for us live. I have heard him play many times before, and I have heard him speak before (most notably at a wonderful White Light concert he gave in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, when music seemed the only thing that lay between us and total darkness). So I knew that going to this San Francisco Symphony concert would be restorative. What I couldn’t have guessed in advance was how long the healing power of it, and my visceral gratitude for it, would stay with me. I can feel it still.