Exceptional is typical for Urbanski
It was just last year that the young Polish conductor Krzysztof Urbanski made a knockout debut with the San Francisco Symphony, leading the orchestra with a rare combination of dramatic intensity and kinetic flair. It was the kind of performance so striking that it left you not quite believing what you’d just witnessed.
Well, you can believe it, all right. Urbanski returned to Davies Symphony Hall on Friday night, Oct. 6, for the first of two nonconsecutive guest weeks with the orchestra, and it turns out his earlier appearance was no fluke at all.
Urbanski takes to the podium like a cross between Arturo Toscanini and Fred Astaire, turning each interpretive
decision into a balletic piece of performance art. He makes music with taut physicality and shimmery lyricism, and he brings the orchestra into the dance with him so that the entire ensemble moves effortlessly as one.
The results, in music by Penderecki, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, were both intellectually probing (in a terrifying feat, Urbanski conducts even the most intricate orchestral works from memory) and sensuously direct.
The more we hear from this 35-year-old conductor, the more urgent it becomes to see what else he can do. Urbanski is currently music director of the Indianapolis Symphony, but I can’t say I envy the orchestra manager who’s being asked to keep him down on that particular farm.
Friday’s program opened with a daring, daunting rarity, Penderecki’s 1960 cri de coeur “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.” This is a piece more known about than known, one that figures in nearly every history of 20th century music without actually showing up in the concert hall (the Symphony has performed it only once before, in 1977 under Seiji Ozawa).
“Threnody” is scored in painstaking detail for 52 string players, and it’s full of unusual instrumental techniques that give the music a ghostly, agonizing surface. Shrieks, whispers and ominous clatters coalesce and disperse, in an expressive landscape that is somewhere between grief and accusation; famously, the piece ends with a giant, densely packed chord that seems to encompass every possible note.
It’s the kind of thing that can easily come off as mannered or even kitschy (especially at more than half a century’s remove), but Urbanski and the orchestra gave it a keen emotional specificity. After asking for a moment of silence in honor of the victims of last week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, Urbanski got the music under way with an almost gentle edge.
Soon enough, though, the performance grew increasingly intense and heartfelt. Just as Penderecki had to invent new notational symbols for some of his more striking instrumental effects, Urbanski seemed to have created a whole new podium lexicon for the occasion — from five-finger explosions to elaborate caressing maneuvers — and all of it bore audible fruit.
He and the orchestra proved no less dynamic after intermission, with a forceful and often raw-boned account of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. The epic first movement, which can register in the wrong hands as an overlong slog, charted a tersely compelling journey, and both the pile-driver rhythms of the second movement and the counterintuitive gaiety of the finale came through powerfully.
In between came Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, with Augustin Hadelich serving as an oddly recessive soloist. I’ve heard Hadelich play with much more robustness and rhythmic freedom than he showed on this occasion, in which even the slow movement sounded a bit thin and reedy. The encore, Paganini’s Caprice No. 21, had more vitality in its few wonderful moments than the entire concerto did.
Urbanski takes to the podium like a cross between Arturo Toscanini and Fred Astaire, turning each interpretive decision into a balletic piece of performance art.