Finnish conductor’s dramatically great Russian program
The excitement surrounding the Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki has grown steadily on each visit she makes to Davies Symphony Hall, and now — with a meaty two-week guest stint at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony — local audiences will have a full chance to savor her musical gifts. Thursday night’s dramatically great all-Russian program offered ample evidence of why Mälkki’s star has risen so quickly.
In music of Mussorgsky, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, she provided an object lesson in how to temper leadership with collaboration for exemplary results. Throughout the concert, Mälkki’s presence on the podium ensured an overall level of unanimity and balance, with big, shapely orchestral textures and crisp but fluid rhythms.
And though much of that emanated from her baton, there was also a clear sense in the hall that the members of the Symphony were being invited to contribute in a way that reflected their own artistic personalities. This was topdown and bottom-up music making all at once.
That combination was clearest after intermission with a performance of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony that was both subtle and dynamically charged. One of the interpretive challenges in this broad-beamed fourmovement work is to illuminate the connections between the farreaching and sensuous odd-numbered movements and the ostensibly brusque rhythms of the others — connections that are closer than they can initially seem.
Mälkki and the orchestra undertook that by injecting the fast movements with robust instrumental textures, and by giving even the lyricism of the slow third movement a crisp rhythmic profile. The opening Andante, the source from which the entire rest of the symphony emerges, unfolded with a bland of radiant patience and expressive urgency; in the ensuing scherzo, Mälkki kept Prokofiev’s trademark motor rhythms chugging along with unflagging precision, while still giving the main theme a welcome, funky looseness.
And in a splendid touch of thematic unity, many of those qualities harked back to the works on the first half of the program. The Prelude to Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” in Shostakovich’s orchestration, unfolded in warm, sonorous colors, moving at a stately but animated pace that would later inform the first movement of the Prokofiev. Principal clarinetist Carey Bell contributed poignant, beautifully turned solos.
In between came Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1, with soloist Christian Tetzlaff giving one of the most extravagantly fine performances he’s given here in years, marked by lustrous string tone, dramatic eloquence and the fearlessness required to throw himself headlong into this demanding score.
Anyone who’s followed Tetzlaff for long enough can’t miss the fact that some kind of transformation has come over him of late. In the early days, his stage presence was stiff and precise, and though his gifts were unmistakable, there was a tightness to his playing that could interfere with its effect.
These days, Tetzlaff sports a Mephistophelean goatee and a wild mop of curls, he moves with easy freedom, and his artistry is more expansive and joyful than it’s ever been. In the Shostakovich, that meant bringing mournful splendor to the long melodic phrases of the opening Nocturne, ferocious wit to the superfast scherzo that follows, and practically titanic power and immediacy to the huge cadenza that sits at the heart of the concerto. The result was breathtaking.