With so many American orchestras already vying to hire chief conductors in coming seasons — us, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Seattle and Cincinnati, to name the biggest players — San Francisco abruptly joining them probably wasn’t on anyone’s 2024 bingo card.
But on March 14, Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 2020 and a frequent CSO guest, announced he would not be renewing his contract, citing fiscal restraints imposed by that orchestra’s board. (Alas, Salonen bowed out of his May performances this season to accept the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm.) Among Salonen’s objections: going forward, the San Francisco Symphony would commission no more than five works per season.
Five? These days, we’re lucky if the CSO’s world-premiere allotment approaches that. Next season, the orchestra slots just one previously unannounced commission: a suite drawn from a previously composed film score by Osvaldo Golijov. Ergo, not much of a new piece at all.
This season, at least, fares better — even if most of its commissionees, save composer-in-residence Jessie Montgomery, would have been more readily spotted on season brochures 25 years ago. In a three-concert cycle conducted by Salonen’s Finnish compatriot Susanna Mälkki, CSO principal flutist Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson debuted Lowell Liebermann’s second flute concerto, the CSO’s second of three commissions this year.
The program, running March 21-24 at Symphony Center, was headlined by Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and also included Wagner’s Prelude to Act I of “Lohengrin.”
Premiered by Sir James Galway in 1992, Liebermann’s first flute concerto was a professional turning point for this dean-to-be of American neoromanticism, and it remains one of his most frequently recorded works. So is his flute sonata, which preceded it by five years and which Höskuldsson himself has recorded. Flute still assumes pride of place in Liebermann’s instrumental output, second only to piano.
Liebermann’s second is a fine follow-up to that modern classic, even if Liebermann sometimes strains to fill the traditional three-movement concerto blueprint rather than letting his creativity lead the way. Had the entire concerto unfolded like the first movement, it would have been a superlative piece: solo flute opens with a haunting cadenza, and even after the orchestra enters, Liebermann casts the soloist’s lines in a quasi-fantasia spirit. At its apex, the flute’s somersaulting lines are interrupted by the brass, sternly crying out the first few bars of — what else — its very opening cadenza. It’s as though the orchestra is scolding the flute for not sticking to the script.
The second movement sags some. It’s supposed to be the soloist’s lyrical showcase, but it requires big-picture phrasing from the orchestra as not to sound mild-mannered; Mälkki and the CSO couldn’t quite deliver on that point in Saturday’s performance. The third movement occasionally, if not completely, sheds the politesse of most of the concerto — at one point rowdy, dissonant clarinets jounce across the orchestration.
None of this dimmed Höskuldsson’s ardent, poised performance. Liebermann’s blueprint certainly ticks all the concerto checkboxes — soloistic liberty in the first, sweeping pensiveness in the second, and quicksilver virtuosity in the third. Höskuldsson met each benchmark with not just ease but palpable satisfaction — a snug fit between commission and dedicatee. Throughout, Höskuldsson’s ear seemed laser-focused on his colleagues behind him, phrasing and timing lines so that they not only sounded lucid over the ensemble but were buoyed by its power.
Höskuldsson’s careful listening was more than musical: at times on this program, it felt necessary. As several major American orchestras churn with regime changes, Mälkki, 55, has been a perennial music director candidate at many of them. Chicago is a conspicuous outlier for never seriously considering her: Mälkki’s last local appearances were in 2017.
This wouldn’t have been the outing to convince CSO suits they are missing their prize. Saturday’s reunion was a less than happy one, and unhappiest of all in the first half of the evening’s anchor, Mahler’s No. 4. Mälkki’s dynamics were uncharacteristically agnostic most of the evening, balance issues bedeviling key points: a beefy entrance in the Liebermann’s atmospheric first tutti, climaxes in the Mahler that clanged with percussion and brass but little else. Concertmaster Robert Chen was almost entirely covered in his first solo in the Mahler — not Chen’s fault, if his squeezed-out solo in the second movement solo was a data point. Mahler directs the first violin to play a scordatura (unconventionally tuned) violin “like a fiddle”; Chen complied, to the point of grimacing gnarliness.
But when the third movement, marked “Serene (Poco adagio),” came around, it was as if one had been teleported to another performance entirely. Mälkki and CSO achieved the easy flow and hushed lyricism that had been missing from both the inner movement of the Liebermann and a rather literal “Lohengrin” prelude which began the concert. One marveled at the CSO cellos’ five-stands, one-mind synchronicity; later, hornist Mark Almond, oboist Lora Schaefer and English hornist Scott Hostetler nestled together for a mid-movement trio, sounding as sensitive as any veteran chamber ensemble. The glimmering, triumphant coda of that movement was the kind of goosebumps moment one craves in the concert hall. Mälkki guided it all with patience and grace.
The last movement — setting a text from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” a Mahler favorite — landed somewhere between the heaven-sent third and the rest of the symphony. Ying Fang, making her subscription debut and last heard here as Pamina in Barrie Kosky’s Looney Tunes “Magic Flute” at Lyric, has a soprano tailor-made for this repertoire: light and nimble, with a tone so limpid and alluring it only needs a shimmer of vibrato. Fang embodied the sweetly naïve “Wunderhorn” text with wide-eyed, girlish wonder.
It could have been a Mahler 4 finale for the ages, but for the same old balance issues that tended, again and again, to engulf Fang. “There’s no music at all on the Earth which can compare to ours,” goes one of the “Wunderhorn” lines. This CSO cycle was the sort that begged comparison — and not always flatteringly.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
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