Arts & Events

Music Director Designate Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony last week in three performances of a program that featured the conductor’s own Violin Concerto with soloist Leila Josefowicz. I had only heard Josefowicz perform once before, many years ago in San Francisco, and I came away from that concert with a decidedly low opinion of Leila Josefowicz as a violinist. Her tone was thin, and she seemed to have simply gone through the motions, imbuing whatever it was she played with little feeling. Perhaps she played one of the classics — “Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, etc., etc.” — she now prefers to leave behind, having stated that she “didn’t want to keep performing pieces that everyone else was performing all the time.” So Leila Josefowicz has reinvented herself as a champion of new works she herself often commissions from contemporary composers.  

Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote his Violin Concerto for Leila Josefowicz, and they collaborated on the premiere of this work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on April 9, 2009. I find Salonen’s Violin Concerto a strained work, one full of excruciating music. It is in four movements, entitled Mirage, Pulse I, Pulse II, and Adieu. The work opens with the solo violin playing a skittering motif, soon joined by vibraphone and harp. When the orchestra enters, it is with low figures in the cellos and basses, with a piccolo floating eerily above. There are trombone snarls and almost inaudible high notes from Leila Josefowicz. There are also breakneck hijinks from the solo violin, with multiple double-stops. All told, there is much scratching and screeching from Leila Josefowicz in this opening movement, and her tone is thin throughout. 

The second movement, Pulse I, offers some respite. Indeed, I found the slow movement the one redeeming element in this otherwise strained concerto. Salonen says he imagined this music as emanating from a silent room where only the heartbeat of a sleeping person lying next to you in bed is audible. Of course, this is an exaggeration, for Pulse I contains more double-stops for solo violin up and down the entire range of the instrument. In Pulse II, all hell breaks loose. There is a phantasmagoria of sound, hints of hip hop, snarling jazz, roaring rock music, and god know what else! Salonen likens this to the club scene in Los Angeles. It is violent and loud. The final movement, entitled Adieu, is a long, excruciating farewell, marked by turbulent interjections from the timpani. The solo violin is partnered first by viola, then oboe, and, finally, by a floating piccolo. At the end, the music just comes to a halt. One wonders, hopefully, is it over? Yes, thankfully, it is over. The loyal San Francisco audience gave Josefowicz and Salonen enthusiastic applause, and Josefowicz offered an unnamed piece by Salonen as her encore. Like much of his Violin Concerto, this unnamed piece by Salonen was strained and angular. 

Bookending the Salonen Violin Concerto were two works not frequently heard — Beethoven’s Overture to King Stephen, Opus 117, and Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5, Opus 50. In 1811, Beethoven received a commission to provide incidental music for two plays by Hungarian author August von Kotzebue that were to be performed in the inauguration of a new theatre in Pest, on the left bank of the Danube in what is now Budapest. The play King Stephen evokes incidents in the life of the late-tenth to early-eleventh century founder of modern Hungary. Of Beethoven’s extensive music for King Stephen, only the Overture is sometimes performed nowadays. It is a strange, disjointed piece. It opens with four ominous notes heard in the brass, evoking some momentous event (or tragedy) to come. However, what follows is a silly little Hungarian dance tune introduced by the flute, and a second Hungarian dance tune, this one much faster, with lively syncopations. Later, there is a variation introduced by flutes and clarinets that is sometimes likened to the melody of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, though here, in the King Stephen Overture, this music seems simply frivolous. Not even a repetition of the ominous four note opening can salvage any grandeur in this King Stephen Overture. 

After intermission, Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony in Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5. This work, in two movements, dates from 1921-2. It opens with an idée fixe, a two-note figure heard repeatedly in the violas. Then the snare drum begins a marathon fifty-seven-fold statement of a simple rhythmic marching figure. The snare drum opens in pianissimo and gradually builds to fortissimo, when it is joined by the triangle. Finally, the celesta completes the obsessive quality of this music with its own insistence on the note D. Where all this marching music is going, however, is questionable, and it remains so. The ubiquitous snare drum, now heard from on high in the left terrace, starts introducing rapid gunshots that shatter what little calm there might be. Then, a bit later, the snare drum has seemingly retreated to an unseen corridor behind the left terrace, now sounding like far-away gunfire. is this supposed to be an evocation of the violence of World War I? Who knows. Nielsen said he didn’t seek to directly evoke the war, but he acknowledged that “it leaves its scars.” Likewise, this symphony leaves its scars. I do not look forward to hearing it again for quite a long time. For that matter, I don’t look forward to hearing again any of the music from this strange and somewhat strained concert any time soon.