Trumpeter adds verve to Symphony
What is a concerto for? Primarily, it’s for showing off. There will be other important things going on, but if the composer hasn’t give the soloist something very difficult to play, or if the soloist hasn’t wowed the audience with a display of virtuosity, then one of them has fallen down on the job.
Mark Inouye, the San Francisco Symphony’s dazzling principal trumpeter, got a suitable challenge from Haydn for the orchestra’s program in Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, July 16, under Music Director EsaPekka Salonen. The results were every bit as striking as you could ask.
This is hardly news for anyone who’s been attending Symphony concerts over the past several years. Inouye’s peerless technique, gleaming tone and interpretive fervor have been assets in all kinds of repertoire, from the Baroque to the contemporary.
But Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in EFlat, which formed the centerpiece of Friday’s program, brings with it a very particular set of challenges. The piece uses the instrument in a way that is a stylistic hybrid of its history and some newly expressive avenues.
The trumpet’s traditional history is as the source of a bright, piercing signal with military connotations, and Haydn doesn’t shy away from that. In the broad opening movement, and again in the jolly, spirited finale, he has the soloist weighing in with forwardthrusting brilliance. Inouye rose to the challenge superbly, lofting high blazes of color and delivering the main theme of the finale with cutting exuberance.
But Haydn was also among the first composers to call on the trumpet for songful lyricism as well as brilliance, and here Inouye’s performance was even more impressive. The melodic turns in the first movement boasted a silky charm, and the central slow movement — graceful and inviting, with a moody tendency to slip into a minor key on short notice — cast a lovely spell.
On Friday, that expressive coloration felt like a callback to the opening selection, Anna Clyne’s tender string elegy “Within Her Arms.” Written in 2009 after the sudden death of the composer’s mother, the piece unfolds as a 15minutes series of slowmoving melodic snippets that curl and tumble across each other in consolatory counterpoint.
This is music that calls for a sinuous rhythmic profile — the beats caress the ear as they land — and Salonen shaped it with an eye toward freedom and firmness. The Symphony’s string players brought a quasi
improvisatory spirit to the performance without sacrificing anything in the way of precision.
Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, on the other hand, alternated between vigorous fluency — the opening measures galloped out of the gate in a thrilling burst of freedom — and passages that still sounded one or two rehearsals away from complete mastery.
The experience of being back in a concert hall listening to live music still feels like a blessing, but there’s also no getting around the fact that 14 months — from the onset of the pandemic to the resumption of live concerts in May — is a long time for an orchestra to be at least partially out of commission. For all the excitement Salonen and the orchestra have generated since their return, a somewhat shaky rendition of a repertory item such as the Mendelssohn came as a reminder of the work that still lies ahead.