WATCH: The Esa-Pekka Salonen era at S.F. Symphony kicks off Saturday.
When composer Nico Muhly was named one of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s collaborative partners at the San Francisco Symphony, he never thought his first assignment would happen during a pandemic.
Fast forward to this week, and Muhly is about to unveil a new work designed for a socially distanced world.
In 2018, when Salonen was announced as the successor to Michael Tilson Thomas as the symphony’s music director, Muhly was thrilled to be among a group of eight musicians, composers and tech innovators chosen by the conductor to expand the symphony’s horizons — a collaborative “dream team” to take the organization into a new era.
Little did anyone know what 2020 would bring. But with Muhly’s “Throughline” making its world premiere on the symphony’s seasonopening online program this week, audiences will get a glimpse of what those collaborators can do. Muhly’s piece provides a brilliant introduction to Salonen’s visionary artists, even as it takes a big step forward into the art of virtual music-making.
With some sections recorded at Davies Symphony Hall, and others captured from points around the world, “Throughline” is the centerpiece of a Saturday program that also includes music by John Adams, Ellen Reid, Kev Choice and Beethoven. It will be streamed from the symphony’s website, and broadcast on KQED-TV.
In a recent call from New York, Muhly said the piece wasn’t designed as a substitute for live performance, but an exploration of what’s possible during the pandemic.
“My thought was to take advantage of the restrictions,” Muhly said, “to treat them as a compositional element.”
Commissioned by the symphony, “Throughline” runs only about 19 minutes, but what it suggests for the future is intriguing. Since COVID-19 restrictions shuttered performance spaces around the world, artists, orchestras and promoting organizations have been scrambling. Many have offered streamed performances as an “until we can get back to normal” substitute. But Muhly says he wanted to make “Throughline” not as a fall-back piece, but one reflecting an innovative approach.
“It was like an architect building on a weird-shaped site,” he said, “rather than feeling like ‘I really wanted this, but I could only get something else.’ What I hadn’t realized was how crazy it was going to be, to actually execute it.”
The score is divided into brief episodes, almost like mini- concertos; Muhly and his fellow collaborators — soprano Julia Bullock; composer Nicholas Britell; flutist Claire Chase; Bryce Dessner, composer and guitarist for rock band The National; violinist Pekka Kuusisto; tech specialist Carol Reiley; and bassist Esperanza Spalding — all perform from various places around the globe; San Francisco Symphony musicians were recorded in Davies Symphony Hall.
The remote performances themselves are wide-ranging: a keyboard solo from Britell, resonant chords from Dessner’s guitar, bravura pieces from Chase and Spalding. Bullock contributes a radiant vocal interlude; Muhly, who conducted the Davies Hall sessions, also serves as pianist in one piece. Salonen appears at the end, strolling through the forest in his native Finland.
Muhly’s previous work includes compositions for dance, theater, film (“Margaret,” “The Reader”), and stage — his opera “Marnie” premiered in 2017 at English National Opera and had live and streamed performances at the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 — and he notes that his film experience was particularly helpful in “Throughline.”
He used a click track to make the small, imperceptible adjustments
needed for remote recording. More difficult, he said, was conducting while he and the musicians were masked. “It was weird,” he says. “I can’t smile at them because I’m in a mask, and I don’t know what these people look like. The only thing to watch is people’s eyes when they play, and that’s beautiful.”
For all its remoteness, though, “Throughline” evokes a surprising sense of connectedness.
The work took months to create and produce — Muhly says that putting it together was “as elaborate as an opera. When we were recording it, it was, ‘ You could never do this live.’ ”
Now that the work’s about to make its official debut, though, he’s not ruling out a future live performance — or anything else. “We have to figure out ‘How else can we do this?’ ” he said. “If we accept the idea that this is how we’re going to be making music for a long while, what does that feel like? It really does call on everyone to do their jobs a little bit differently, both on and off stage. If things like this are pointing a way forward, I think that’s great.”