Guest conductor comes in roaring
Is Pablo Heras-Casado in the running to succeed Michael Tilson Thomas as the San Francisco Symphony’s music director? The rumor mill is ambiguous on this point — as the rumor mill tends to be — but if he’s actually under consideration, the Spanish conductor could only have bolstered his case with a largely brilliant guest appearance in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, March 1.
In building the program on two apparently diverse works — Esa-Pekka Salonen’s virtuoso curtain-raiser “Helix” from 2006, and Brahms’ First Symphony after intermission — Heras-Casado gave the entire evening a distinctive dramatic shape, outlining the connections between scores that might seem not to have much to say to each other. He elicited playing of vigor and elegance from the orchestra throughout the concert.
And perhaps most strikingly, Heras-Casado revealed a new side to his personality as a performing artist, one that has not been much in evidence during his several prior visits to Davies. Those engagements have mostly revealed him as a fastidious craftsman, with a conscientious eye and ear for detail and a fine-grained interpretive approach.
But on Thursday, as if to herald the beginning of March, Heras-Casado came roaring in like a lion. There was a thunderous physicality to his conducting that I don’t recall having witnessed before, a readiness to unleash the full sonic resources of the orchestra and to marshal them in the service of fullblooded accounts of music both old and new.
“Helix,” which entered the Symphony repertoire for the first time (Salonen conducted it himself during a 2012 visit to Berkeley at the helm of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra), rewards just that sort of fearless bravado. The piece takes its inspiration from Ravel’s “Boléro” and “La Valse,” big orchestral pileups in which apparently innocent processes wind up running amok.
In “Helix,” the process is rhythmic, although it takes a while to cotton on to that fact. The music begins with a steady, ominous four-beat tread, adorned on top by an eerie little piccolo melody that Catherine Payne delivered with unnerving directness.
Then Salonen starts shading in the squares with increasingly dense harmonies and dark profusions of orchestral texture, while ostensibly maintaining the rhythmic backdrop. But it’s a brilliant illusion — in reality, the rhythm is growing ever tauter, bit by bit, until the piece explodes like a sprung watch coil, scattering shards of sound all around.
Heras-Casado and the orchestra brought out the music’s intense ferocity, and came back to it — tellingly, joltingly — in the first measures of the Brahms, whose slow, steely timpani thwacks turned out to be almost a direct echo of Salonen’s opening. What followed was a performance of breathtaking immediacy and dramatic urgency.
Heras-Casado invested the first movement especially with hell-for-leather rhythmic momentum, driving from one key point to the next with unerring focus. (He also endeared himself to me by taking Brahms’ marked repeats, trusting the composer on this point as not all conductors do.) The slow movement sounded tender but solid, framed by gorgeous solos from oboist Eugene Izotov and associate concertmaster Nadya Tichman. If the finale sounded a little undercooked by comparison — as if HerasCasado hadn’t quite settled on which of several possible interpretive approaches he favored — there was no denying the movement’s visceral power and sweep.
Power and sweep, unfortunately, were harder to come by in between, as concertmaster Alexander Barantschik took the stage for a surprisingly inert account of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2.
Barantschik is a consistently expressive and even inspiring presence from his usual perch at the head of the orchestra’s violins, but as a concerto soloist he is often overcome by diffidence. His Shostakovich sounded tentative, flat and dutiful; not until the cadenza of the last movement did he suddenly come alive and give the music its necessary vitality.