Polished showing by guest conductor
When a smattering of applause rippled through Davies Hall on Friday, May 25, after the first movement of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102, San Francisco Symphony guest conductor David Robertson had an answer. Wheeling around to face the audience, he deadpanned, in reference to the movements still to come, “We have three encores.”
Robertson, the outgoing music director of the St. Louis Symphony and a longtime visitor to the Davies podium, had a lot more than witty ad libs to offer. Through an absorbing, wide-ranging and emotionally consequential reading of the Haydn, one of the composer’s late great London symphonies, he and the players made everything count.
In the long and eventful first movement, the conductor and his adopted San Francisco players mustered a premonitory pressure in the slow opening bars. When the valve was released, in the quickening second subject, the driving impetus kicked in. Robertson turned the angular shifts and whirling development into an urgent musical argument, punctuated by hairpin-turn dynamics and dramatically sudden rests.
The “encores” lived up in full. A suave Adagio featured associate principal cellist Peter Wyrick’s effectively characterized, slightly raw-boned arpeggios as a backdrop. The Menuet came on with a bracing tread, emphatically underlined phrases and false cadences and a woodwind-enriched tartsweet trio section.
Robertson, whose highly
physical conducting bordered on dance at times, as he bounced and swerved, his head whipping from side to side to signal entrances, took his act public in the fleet Finale. Twice he turned to the audience with mock astonishment on his face as Haydn tucked several fake-out melodic and rhythmic surprises into a prestissimo race to the finish line. The humor, like everything else in this fully engaged reading, was at once refreshing and right on point.
Brett Dean’s 2013 Engelsflügel (“Wings of Angels”) opened the concert. The 10-minute work, receiving a U.S. premiere in its fully orchestrated form, has roots in the composer’s affection for both Brahms’ solo piano music and wind ensembles. Those trace elements could be felt in this impressionistic, appealingly textured work.
From the tentative, half-formed woodwind mutterings and softly scrabbling strings at the outset, Dean compelled a kind of lean-in attention. His delicate writing cohered into fleeting lyrical fragments and an overall sense of breathing naturalness. The music inflated, powered through percussive outbursts and scale-spanning string figures and gradually deflated. The prominence of the flutes heightened the sense of airy exchanges the piece induced.
Played with consummate attention to detail and design, the piece made an evocative imprint on first hearing. As the angels of Dean’s title came to mind, they weren’t so much airborne as they were drawing in the precious breath they’d need for their heavenly callings.
The second half of the evening was devoted to Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, with Kirill Gerstein as soloist. It was a brash, often harshly unyielding performance in the moreis-more school of thought.
After Robertson laid down a solid but lean sound in the Maestoso opening, Gerstein entered with a tightly reined, drily percussive approach. Soon enough, he was pounding through chordal passagework. Contouring and interpretive nuance were sacrificed to tempestuous keyboard pyrotechnics. The orchestra and soloist were largely in accord on tempos and entrances, but they didn’t seem to be communicating very deeply, especially in a rather vacant Adagio.
Gerstein’s take worked best in the closing Rondo. The pulse-quickening pace showcased his wizardly command of everything from deeply sonorous chords and harmonic complexities to blurring trills. In a curtain call, Robertson hoisted his soloist’s arm, as he might have for a prizefighter who had battled hard through all 10 rounds.