SAN FRANCISCO — Saturday evening, Esa-Pekka Salonen carried out his San Francisco Symphony in a staggering efficiency of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, referred to as the “Resurrection.” It was a ferocious efficiency and an exalted certainly one of gripping depth.
This can be a symphony emblematic for Mahler of life and dying, an pressing questioning of why we’re right here. After 80 minutes of the very best highs and lowest lows, of falling out and in of affection with life, of smelling essentially the most sensual roses on the planet in a seek for renewal, resurrection arrives in a blaze of amazement.
Mahler has no solutions for the aim of life. His triumph, and Salonen’s in his overpowering efficiency, is within the divine glory of conserving going, conserving asking.
The viewers responded with a surprised and tumultuous standing ovation. The musicians pounded their toes on the Davies Symphony Corridor stage, resisting Salonen’s urgings to face and take a bow.
It was now not his San Francisco Symphony. After 5 years as music director, Salonen had declined to resume his contract, saying he didn’t share the board of trustees’ imaginative and prescient of the long run.
“I’ve solely two issues to say,” Salonen advised the group earlier than exiting the stage.
“First: Thanks.
“Second: You’ve heard what you might have on this metropolis. This wonderful orchestra, this wonderful refrain. So take excellent care of them.”
Salonen, who occurs to be a little bit of a tech nerd and is a science-fiction fan, had come to San Francisco as a result of he noticed the Bay Space as a spot the place the long run is foretold and the town as a spot that thinks otherwise and turns goals into actuality.
Right here he would proceed the type of transformation of the orchestra right into a automobile for social and technological good that he had begun in his 17 years as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was to be an excellent experiment in arts and society in a metropolis presumably able to reclaim its personal previous glory.
He had the benefit of following within the symphonic footsteps of Michael Tilson Thomas, who for 25 years had made the orchestra a pacesetter in reflecting the tradition of its time and place. Salonen introduced in a staff of younger, venturesome “artistic companions” from music and tech. He enlisted architect Frank Gehry to rethink live performance venues for the town. He put collectively imaginative and impressive tasks with director Peter Sellars. He made fabulous recordings.
There have been obstacles. The COVID-19 pandemic meant the cancellation of what would have been Tilson Thomas’ personal intrepid farewell celebration 5 years in the past — a manufacturing of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” with a set by Gehry and staged by James Darrah (the daring creative director of Lengthy Seaside Opera). Salonen’s first season needed to be streamed throughout lockdown however turned essentially the most technologically imaginative of any remoted orchestra.
Like arts organizations all over the place and significantly in San Francisco, which has had a tougher time than most bouncing again from the pandemic, the San Francisco Symphony had its share of budgetary issues. However it additionally had, in Salonen, a music director who knew a factor or two about how one can get out of them.
He had turn into music director of the L.A. Phil in 1992, when the town was devastated by earthquake, riots and recession. The constructing of Walt Disney Live performance Corridor was about to be deserted. The orchestra constructed up within the subsequent few years a deficit of round $17 million. The viewers, a few of the musicians and the press wanted awakening.
Salonen was on the verge of resignation, however the administration stood behind him, believing in what he and the orchestra may turn into. With the opening of Disney Corridor in 2003, the L.A. Phil remodeled Los Angeles.
And for that opening, Salonen selected Mahler’s “Resurrection” for the primary of the orchestra’s subscription sequence of concert events. Rebirth on this thrillingly large symphony for a large orchestra and refrain, together with soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, was writ exceedingly massive, clear and loud. On Oct. 30, 2003, with L.A. weathering file warmth and fires, Salonen’s Mahler exulted a greater future.
Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in Davies Symphony Corridor on Saturday.
(Brandon Patoc / San Francisco Symphony)
The San Francisco Symphony has not adopted the L.A. Phil instance. It didn’t put its religion and funds in Salonen’s imaginative and prescient, regardless of 5 years of pleasure. It didn’t present the town how one can rise once more. Subsequent season is the primary in 30 years that seems to be with out a mission.
In Disney 22 years in the past, Salonen drew consideration to the sheer transformative energy of sound. On the identical time Tilson Thomas had turned the San Francisco Symphony into the nation’s most expansive Mahler orchestra, and it was just a few months later that he carried out the Second Symphony and recorded it in Davies Symphony Corridor in a luminously expressive account. That recording stands as a reminder of the hopes again then of a brand new century.
Salonen’s extra acute method, not precisely offended however exceptionally decided, was one other type of monument to the ability of sound. In quietest, barely audible passages, the air within the corridor had an electrical sense of calm earlier than the storm. The large climaxes pinned you to the wall.
The refrain, which seems within the closing motion to exhort us to stop trembling and put together to stay, proved its personal inspiration. The administration all however cost-cut the singers out of the funds till saved by an nameless donor. The 2 soloists, Heidi Stober and Sasha Cooke, soared as wanted.
Salonen strikes on. Subsequent week he takes the New York Philharmonic on an Asia tour. At Salzburg this summer season, he and Sellars stage Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” a challenge he started with the San Francisco Symphony. On the Lucerne Pageant, he premieres his Horn Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris as a substitute of the San Francisco Symphony, as initially meant.
Saturday’s live performance had begun with a ridiculous however illuminating announcement to “sit again and calm down as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts your San Francisco Symphony.”
Salonen, as a substitute, provided a wondrous metropolis a wake-up name.
