Getting loopy

In its first San Francisco performances, Esa-Pekka Salonen's Cello Concerto put electronic technology to brilliant use

Cellist Rainer Eudeikis and Esa-Pekka Salonen with the San Francisco Symphony (Photo: Brandon Patoc)

When Esa-Pekka Salonen introduced his 2016 Cello Concerto to Bay Area audiences, in a Berkeley concert five years ago with the Philharmonia Orchestra, I predicted that it would always be remembered as “the one with the bongos.” How very wrong I was.

The San Francisco Symphony played the piece in Davies Symphony Hall last week for the first time, and the bongos only scratch the surface. This three-movement masterpiece, originally written for Yo-Yo Ma and played here with magnificent verve and sensitivity by the orchestra’s principal cellist, Rainer Eudeikis, is packed full of so many inventive strokes that it’s hard to single out just one to celebrate. Other composers make you think things like “What a beautiful melody,” or “I like that rhythmic motif.” But Salonen’s compositions are high-concept in the best way. They make you think, “How the hell did he even come up with that?”

In the central slow movement of the Cello Concerto, Salonen calls for an electronic looping system. The soloist plays a few simple notes, which are recorded in real time; then the recorded sample is played back a few times through speakers placed around the stage and throughout the hall. It’s like a delicately shaped echo effect, repeated in space while the cellist and the orchestra go on to other things.

Looping technology has been around for a while, and has been employed for all kinds of harmonic and dramatic effects. What’s striking about Salonen’s use of it here is how economical it is, and also how deliberate. He uses looping with such determined efficiency — first as a musical ornament, then as a textural thickener, and finally in a gloriously theatrical tour de force — that it becomes an essential musical resource and not a gimmick. It’s like the moment when a composer says, “Right here, just for these four measures, I must use a contrabass flute.”

About that tour de force: The soloist executes a few long, keening glissandos from the cello’s highest notes — “MEEEEeeeew!” “MEEEEeeeew!” — and the looper picks them up. They reverberate throughout the hall and, once dissociated from their source, morph into a flock of seabirds shrieking and circling overhead. The very sounds you just heard a moment ago become something entirely other. How the hell did he even come up with that?

The rest of the concerto is equally mesmerizing and equally dramatic. The opening movement is dense and assaultive, sending the soloist racing through a thicket of orchestral chords from which blurry figures slowly emerge. The finale is the one with the bongos (principal percussionist Jacob Nissly, brisk and precise as always); it combines intricate rhythmic byplay with a recurrent full-orchestra rise and fall, as exuberant as a toddler maxing out the amplitude of a swing set. My god it’s fun, and beautiful, and thrilling.

You know who else loved it? The audience that packed Davies on Friday night to celebrate Salonen and his nonpareil artistry as both a conductor and a composer. I don’t want to start penning weekly rants about Salonen’s departure, or the short-sightedness that has led to that incomprehensible institutional failure. But there was no way to witness the excitement of this event — the outpouring of love directed from the hall to the stage, the ovation that brought Salonen and Eudeikis back for curtain call after curtain call, the enthusiasm with which this superb but not especially accessible work was received — and not wonder about the choices and priorities that have brought the organization to its current impasse.

Elsewhere:

Rebecca Wishnia, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “Eudeikis, who was hired by Salonen in 2022, rose to the piece’s challenges — and then some.”
Lisa Hirsch, Iron Tongue of Midnight: “The careful miking of the recording makes it easier to hear everything going on in the concerto, and there is a lot. It is a really beautiful and interesting piece, and it didn't sound as good in Davies as on the recording.”
Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio: “The performance was as engaging as it was energetic.”

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Do I repeat myself?

Along with his Cello Concerto, Salonen also led the orchestra in a sleek and dynamic account of Debussy’s La Mer and a gloriously warm and tender rendition of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral.” I spoke to a couple of very experienced listeners afterward who both said, independently, that they’d found the Beethoven a little dull, a bit meandery. I knew what they meant, but they were describing the qualities I most appreciated in Salonen’s interpretation.

Beethoven is a prickly and intense companion just about all of the time. The image of him shaking his fist in angry defiance at the gods is a caricature, and a partial reckoning at best, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere. So much of his music is deeply adversarial, and even his slow movements are shot through with surges of emotion and brow-furrowing angst. He can tire you out.

The Sixth Symphony is one of the rare exceptions. It has a gentleness, an abundance of chill, which Salonen’s reading rendered perfectly. The phrasing in the first two movements especially was gorgeously soft-edged and forgiving; you just knew Beethoven wasn’t going to yell at you about anything you’d done. The finale, which is so undramatic it can often come off as bland or anticlimactic, landed this time with affecting forbearance. I didn’t miss the turmoil in the least.

Here's what I did miss, though: The repetition of the exposition section in the first movement. I don’t know how to say this forcefully enough, but the marked repeats in an 18^th- or 19^th-century score are not optional. They’re there for a reason, and the reason is that the composer would like you to play the music twice. It’s that simple. If once were enough, the repeat markings would not be in the score.

A key structural point in the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony

I made the case for this position years ago, and I’m not sure I have too much more to add to that absolutely correct jeremiad. The Talmud, however, says that anyone who identifies the source of a piece of learning brings redemption into the world, so I will briefly add that I became a play-the-repeats absolutist through the writings of the late music critic Alan Rich, from whom I learned much else besides. I’d also like to serve notice that, freed from The Chronicle’s wise and professional editorial strictures, I intend to now become a relentless crank on this subject.

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Not a minute too bassoon

Speaking of the San Francisco Symphony: There’s been no official announcement or confirmation from the office, but Joshua Elmore is publicly celebrating his appointment as the orchestra’s new principal bassoonist, succeeding the great Stephen Paulson. I’m inclined to celebrate along with him. I have no notion of Elmore’s musical abilities. I must have heard him during a trial week or two, but I don’t recall. He comes to town from the Fort Worth Symphony, and I’m optimistically eager to hear what he brings to San Francisco.

Bassoonist Joshua Elmore (Photo: Aaron Giglio)

Here’s one thing we can say right out of the gate, though: Elmore’s presence brings the number of Black musicians in the orchestra from zero to one. Depending on your temperament and your mathematical outlook, you could describe that as the smallest possible improvement to a historically lamentable situation, or you could describe it as an infinity-percent increase. Both are accurate. The lack of African American musicians — not only in the SF Symphony but in orchestras nationwide — is a perennial scandal, one of a range of systemic inequities that continue to plague the field while those in power resist change. Every incremental improvement is simultaneously welcome and grossly inadequate to the situation.

Let’s flesh this out a little more from a local perspective. I’ve been covering the San Francisco Symphony since the mid-1980s, and I’ve seen a lot of musicians come and go. I don’t remember all of them. But I can tell you off the top of my head about both Black members the orchestra has had in the past 40 years, because…well, because both. Basil Vendryes was a member of the viola section when I got to town; he left in 1993 to become principal violist of the Colorado Symphony, where he remains to this day. Then in 2009, Nicole Cash joined the orchestra as associate principal horn. She was a terrific artist and a great treasure within the organization, but within a few years her career was tragically cut short by focal dystonia, the mysterious neurological disorder that can cause the muscles in a musician’s hand to cramp or seize up. And that’s the entire roster.

So Elmore’s arrival is good news, but it damn well isn’t good enough. It’s absurd to expect one man to both play the bassoon and be an emblem of the racial inequities in his chosen profession. It’s long past time to make this kind of concern obsolete.

On a happier note, Elmore seems poised to continue the blue-glasses tradition established and made famous by MTT.

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The seven-hour sampler plan

It’s one thing to know that the Bay Area is home to an unbelievable abundance of music, and another to experience the crush of offerings within a single afternoon and a single multi-stage venue. SF Music Day, the annual extravaganza sponsored at the Veterans’ War Memorial by InterMusic SF, is that kind of compact, high-intensity smorgasbord. For the space of seven hours, the event takes over all the building’s performing spaces — Herbst Theatre, the second-floor Green Room, and the Taube Atrium Theatre — and packs them with a rotating array of eclectic artists. You can dip in and out at will, which is great; you’re always missing something, though.

Soprano Bethany Hill (Photo: Lenny Gonzalez)

Sunday’s installment was curated by the wonderful San Francisco singer and collaborative artist Sidney Chen, who assembled a program that was both representative and unusual. My visit included plenty of transfixing performances, including a ravishing program of Baroque and Romantic music by countertenor Kyle Tingzon and pianist Benjamin Liupaogo, with violist Ellen Ruth Rose; a taste of Astor Piazzolla deftly delivered by the Circadian String Quartet; excerpts from soprano Chelsea Hollow and pianist Taylor Chan’s commissioning project Cycles of Resistance; and soprano Bethany Hill’s beguiling mix of Appalachian folksong and Italian Baroque.

I was especially taken with a recital by baritone Simon Barrad and pianist Kseniia Polstiankina Barrad of American songs by Charles Ives, Paul Simon, Marc Blitzstein, and others. At a juncture when patriotic sentiment can feel so tenuous and so fraught, it was good to be reminded of some of the brighter elements of our common national inheritance: wit, sensitivity, and grace.

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Cryptic clue of the week

From Out of Left Field #238 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:

Writers I have thoughtfully absorbed (7)

Last week’s clue:

“Stockpile money,” they say (5)

Solution: CACHE
Stockpile: definition
money: “cash”
they say: homophone indicator

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Coming Up

• The Matchbox Magic Flute: Theatrical director Mary Zimmerman returns to the Berkeley Rep with a scaled-down adaptation of Mozart’s opera using 10 singers and five instrumentalists. Zimmerman’s watery version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which the Rep staged in 2019, was an unforgettable masterpiece of theatrical invention, raising hopes for this work as well. Through Dec. 8, Berkeley Rep. www.berkeleyrep.org.

• Voices of Music: The excellent early-music group celebrates the music of 17^th-century Italy with a guest appearance by soprano Sherezade Panthaki, an artist of arresting eloquence and vocal beauty. This is music that is still far too rarely heard in concert, and the program focuses on such female composers as Isabelle Leonarda, Francesca Caccini, and Barbara Strozzi. Oct. 25-27, Palo Alto, Berkeley, San Francisco. www.voicesofmusic.org.

• Music of Galina Ustvolskaya: The Russian composer, a student and associate of Shostakovich’s who died in 2006 at age 87, wrote music of knotty, ferocious splendor. The gifted young pianist Conor Hanick, appearing under the auspices of Other Minds, offers a complete account of her six piano sonatas, dating from 1947 to 1988. Oct. 28, Freight & Salvage, Berkeley. www.otherminds.org.