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San Francisco Chronicle
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Hilary Hahn draws a packed house for Esa-Pekka Salonen and S.F. Symphony
Like a slow drumroll, four strikes of the timpani herald the beginning of Beethoven's Violin Concerto. This time, they also announced Hilary Hahn's triumphant return to San Francisco. The American violinist resumed performing earlier this spring after taking a monthslong hiatus due to injury. In past seasons, Hahn had come to the Bay Area most often as a recitalist, which made this San Francisco Symphony concert on Thursday, May 29 — one of Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen's final programs before he departs the orchestra in mid-June — that much more special. More Information Esa-Pekka Salonen's final concerts Esa-Pekka Salonen & Hilary Hahn: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 30; 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1. $49-$350. Salonen Conducts Sibelius 7: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. June 6-7; 2 p.m. June 8. $49-$179. Salonen Conducts Mahler 2: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, June 12-14. $145-$399. All shows are at Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit Beethoven's concerto, however, is as ubiquitous as classical music gets. How could it be otherwise, with such singable melodies? The embellishments throughout the solo part, pearly scales and arpeggios, resemble a violinist's warmup — simple in theory and yet almost impossibly difficult to hit in front of an audience. Hahn augmented the concerto's technical scope with her choice of cadenzas, the same substantial ones by turn-of-the-century violinist Fritz Kreisler that she's been playing since her days as a child prodigy. Indeed, this performance wasn't so very different from the recording she made at 18 or even from her earlier German debut with the piece in a now-famous televised concert. This isn't to slight the Hahn of 2025. She was simply that rare young artist who seemed to emerge fully formed — with tasteful interpretations, stellar bow technique and near-flawless intonation. After the orchestra's elegant introduction, Hahn's superpowers were on display from the first ascending octaves through the final chords. The bravura passages, in which she exerted extraordinary control over the dropping of her left-hand fingers, were brilliant and clear. The slow movement's variations were lacy fine, the wispy high notes resounding like tiny, perfect bells. And the musicality was a touch more expressive from the mature violinist. The streams of triplets in the opening Allegro, and the silvery slurs in a dolorous corner of the Rondo finale, seemed more considered. Here and there (and in the encore, Steven Banks' 'Through My Mother's Eyes,' a schmaltzy showpiece with a big heart), the phrases broadened more than they once did. Some three decades into her career and with a full house rooting for her, Hahn appeared to revel anew in this old music. Her fans made an impressive audience for Beethoven's Fourth Symphony in the first half of the program — a performance that, under Salonen's leadership, struggled both rhythmically and dramatically. If the Fourth — a refined work tucked between Beethoven's heroic 'Eroica' and fateful Fifth — is perhaps the least played of the composer's nine symphonies, it's not the piece's fault, only the programmers'. At any rate, the San Francisco Symphony has engaged Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden for a Beethoven cycle covering three seasons, beginning in 2026. Let the Fourth soon sound again.
San Francisco Chronicle
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Bay Area fans flock to see Esa-Pekka Salonen before final S.F. performances
Esa-Pekka Salonen 's final month as music director of the San Francisco Symphony has begun, and the lines at the Davies Symphony Hall box office are just one sign of how much Bay Area audiences are going to miss him. At the front of it for the Symphony's matinee of the last of three performances with violinist Hillary Hahn on Sunday, June 1,were patrons and old Symphony supporters Devorra Depper and Ophelia Salazar. The two San Franciscans arrived an hour and a half before showtime looking for an upgrade in order to get as close as possible to the conductor. 'I wanted to see him again as many times as I can before he left,' said Depper, who has been a Symphony patron for 40 years. She added she plans to see Salonen conduct three more times before his final performance on June 14. 'Each music director brings a different quality and I don't want to rank them but I just think he is superb,' she went on. 'He has a fabulous relationship with the orchestra and it makes for a marvelous listening experience.' In March 2024, the Finnish conductor announced he was severing ties with the orchestra after just five years — one of those years lost to the COVID-19 lockdown — citing differences with the Symphony's Board of Governors. Since then, the institution's financial challenges have been made public, with musicians frustrated to the point of protest because they've been performing without a contract. (As of a joint statement issued by the administration and the union on May 14, they expressed 'an ongoing commitment to the bargaining process.') While Salonen is not in the musicians' union, he has made statements in the past that are sympathetic to their cause. Those sentiments were echoed by many attendees at Sunday's show. 'It should be the musicians making the decisions, not the board,' said Salazar, who has been a Symphony subscriber for 31 years. 'It is the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra that matters. If that is not there, you have nothing.' Still, no matter what's been happening backstage, the audience didn't get that sense once Salonen came bouncing out the stage door to a warm ovation on Sunday before a mostly sold out auditorium of more than 2,500. By intermission, Salonen had been called out from the wings twice by audience ovations, with some standing. 'He's a great conductor who brings out the best in the orchestra,' Jonathan Kaner of Berkeley reflected. 'He chooses a smart program and is engaging and fun.' Now there are only six concerts left, plus an open rehearsal, before the Salonen era comes to a close. '(I'm) really sorry to see Salonen go,' Kaner said, 'really sorry.'
San Francisco Chronicle
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
What does a conductor really do? Unveiling the mystique behind the baton
If you go to an orchestra concert, it's pretty easy to figure out what most of the people onstage are contributing to the overall experience. The violinists and cellists move their bows back and forth across the strings, providing lush, sweeping carpets of sound. The flutists tootle sweetly and the percussionist gives an occasional thwack on the big bass drum. Meanwhile, everyone's attention is focused on the man or woman standing on the podium, waving a baton and contributing… what, exactly? It's a legitimate question. Classical music devotees and concert hall neophytes alike tend to take it for granted that it's the conductor, more than anyone, who lends each orchestral performance its distinctive character. The conductor has become practically a cultural archetype, the object of endless fascination and the subject of breathless biographies and Hollywood films. Recent examples include Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic ' Maestro ' (2023) and the Oscar-nominated ' Tár ' (2022), starring Cate Blanchett. So when the music sizzles and soars, the conductor gets the credit. When it bogs down, or fails to cohere into a meaningful whole, the conductor takes the blame. More Information Esa-Pekka Salonen's Final Concerts Esa-Pekka Salonen & Hilary Hahn: San Francisco Symphony. 2 p.m. Thursday, May 29; 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 30; 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1. $49-$350. Salonen Conducts Sibelius 7: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. June 6-7; 2 p.m. June 8. $49-$179. Salonen Conducts Mahler 2: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, June 12-14. $145-$399. All shows are at Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit But what are they actually doing up there? Why is the conductor so important to a performance, and what are the skills that make one conductor's work audibly better than another's? These questions are always relevant, but they've become even more urgent as Bay Area audiences prepare for the departure of San Francisco Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen after his final performance on June 14. (The search for Salonen's replacement is currently under way, according to Symphony spokesperson Taryn Lott. But the process can take several years, she added, and 'like most hiring practices, much of the process will not take place publicly to protect the privacy of those involved.') To understand what makes a conductor's contributions to any individual performance distinctive — as well as the importance of a music director's ongoing presence in the life of an orchestra — is to begin to grasp the magnitude of the impending loss. 'A music director, because they work with an orchestra for 16 or 18 weeks out of the year, has a real impact on that orchestra's sound,' said John Mangum, who served as the Symphony's artistic administrator in 2011-14 before taking on the top executive posts at the Houston Symphony and, since last year, the Lyric Opera of Chicago. 'They don't just conduct great concerts. They take the lead in shaping the orchestra's sound, and their interests define the organization's artistic profile.' But even within the more limited scope of a one-week guest engagement or a single concert, a conductor wields enormous influence over the musical outcome. Nicole Paiement, artistic and general director of San Francisco's Opera Parallèle, likens a conductor to the architect of a musical performance, and the individual musicians to the carpenters, masons and electricians responsible for their particular tasks. 'Members of an orchestra are great musicians, and they know how to play their parts better than the conductor does,' Paiement said. 'But what they don't have is the whole picture of the piece. As the conductor, you are the only one who has an image in your mind of how everything fits together. It's up to you to keep everyone together in a single vision.' Shepherding some 100 skilled artists through a performance that is simultaneously precise and expressively free, with a coherent interpretive point of view that makes an audience hear something new and lively in what is often familiar repertoire, can seem like an implausibly complicated feat. It requires an ability to track large numbers of simultaneous musical strands in real time. It calls for interpersonal gifts that can inspire musicians to do their best in the service of the conductor's vision. (Older generations of conductors leaned more heavily on tyrannical browbeating — a technique that, like spanking children, has happily gone out of fashion.) It also entails cultivating and mastering an enormous gestural language, an array of physical and facial cues that allow conductors to communicate wordlessly but unambiguously with members of the orchestra. A lot of that multitasking can be invisible to an audience, because most of the work of conducting takes place in rehearsal. That's where interpretive priorities are set, difficult transitions are ironed out and agreements are worked out in advance. 'What the audience sees at a performance is really the final touches of what a conductor does,' says Patti Niemi, the acting principal percussionist of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. 'By then, they're mostly a traffic cop. Their primary purpose is everything they do up to that point.' Historically speaking, conductors weren't always part of the orchestral tradition. Until about 1820, an orchestra's principal requirement was someone to beat time, and that task could be entrusted to a member of the orchestra — typically the concertmaster (the leader of the first violin section) or someone at the harpsichord or piano. Even today, there are ensembles such as San Francisco's New Century Chamber Orchestra that perform without a conductor. Other groups could do it if they had to. 'Truth be told, any orchestra could probably play Beethoven's Fifth without a conductor,' said violinist René Mandel, who plays frequently with the San Francisco Symphony and is the former executive director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. 'You could have the concertmaster leading off, and the orchestra could do it on their own with the concertmaster guiding them through certain spots. But, he added, 'that doesn't mean you don't need a conductor.' The importance of the conductor grew steadily throughout the 19th century, as orchestras became larger and as the music written for them became more complex. At the same time, the aesthetics of the Romantic era contributed to a regard for the conductor as an exalted poetic figure, second only to the actual composer. The aura surrounding a conductor still lingers, because there does seem to be something almost other-worldly about what they do. Talk to any musician about the conductor's role, and you can be sure that a vein of vague magical thinking will surface before the conversation is more than a few minutes old. 'For me, the best conductors have an intangible quality to what they do,' said Mangum. 'It's hard to pin down, but you know it as soon as you hear it. They have a vision in mind of what they want to achieve musically, and they can convey that to the orchestra physically or verbally or both.' A conductor such as the late Bernard Haitink, according to Edwin Outwater, 'can create so much beauty just in the way they draw sound from an orchestra.' 'It's the way he moved,' continued Outwater, who heads the conducting program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 'and the way he elicited the music physically and with his eyes and face. A conductor connects a group of people and gets them on the same page so they can sound beautiful and expressive.' Mystical woo-woo aside, though, the list of hard practicalities a conductor is responsible for is strikingly long. The most basic task is simply keeping the beat so that every member of the orchestra knows where they are at any given moment. As with nearly every aspect of the craft, there are countless ways to do this, and each conductor finds a personal technique. Most use a baton so as to show a downbeat as crisply and precisely as possible; others prefer to use just their hands. Even the simple act of beating time contains multitudes from an interpretive standpoint. A sharp downward chop of the baton, for example, prompts the orchestra to play a phrase in a crisply articulated fashion, while a fluid side-to-side motion elicits something gentler and more mellifluous. The conductor also has to keep tabs on which musicians have been silent for a while, and let them know when it's time for them to resume playing. 'You don't want to cue the violins while they have the big melody,' explains Paiement. 'That's annoying to the violinists. But an oboist who hasn't played for 52 bars and suddenly enters? To acknowledge that entrance and say, 'Here we go, this is where you come in' — that's totally important.' Beyond these practical nuts and bolts lies a more elusive set of skills: the art of conveying mood, phrasing and articulation to the orchestra through silent communication. (If there's one thing conductors and orchestra musicians agree on, it's that the less a conductor talks, the better.) During a lesson at the Conservatory last spring, Outwater coached Chih-Yao Chang, a Taiwanese graduate student in the conducting program, through a tricky section of Stravinsky's ballet 'Petrushka,' while pianist Peter Grünberg served as a stand-in for the orchestra. The lesson involved an occasional correction of rhythm or timing, but most of it was devoted to helping Chang get the right response from a hypothetical orchestra. In the opening measures, which depict a country fair, Outwater demonstrated how he would conduct the passage, then prompted Chang for a description. 'What changed about the gesture?' he asked. 'What did I do differently?' 'It's lighter,' Chang said. 'Lighter, yeah, and bigger. More open. The music is energetic, but it has to have some buoyancy too,' Outwater added. Later, he urged Chang to keep in mind that 'Petrushka' is a ballet. 'The next step is not to conduct but to dance with the orchestra,' Outwater noted. 'Sometimes you direct the orchestra if you want to bring them through a phrase, but for a lot of this rhythmic music you have to create a feeling of dancing together.' Chang, who started out as a flutist, switched to conducting in the wake of a lung injury. The difference between the two pursuits, he said, is striking. 'As a flutist, you only need to care about yourself and your score. But as a conductor, you're working with 60 or 70 people who all have different characters and different abilities,' Chang observed. 'How to combine everybody is very interesting to me.' Ultimately, the conductor's job is to fuse all those disparate musical sensibilities into a single interpretive voice. Just as a violinist or a bassoonist makes expressive choices in approaching a single phrase, the conductor uses the orchestra to shape an entire work. 'Fundamentally, a conductor's purpose is to use us as their instrument,' says the Opera Orchestra's Niemi. 'They make all the fundamental choices about a piece of music.' And the range of choices is practically infinite, as Outwater likes to demonstrate by invoking the opening line of Hamlet's soliloquy. ''To be or not to be' — those are six words on the page, but there are a thousand ways to say it,' he points out. 'Laurence Olivier says it one way, Kenneth Branagh says it another way. 'The same thing is true of the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth. There are four notes, but there are a million ways to do them that have multiple possibilities and meanings.'
San Francisco Chronicle
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Esa-Pekka Salonen's final S.F. Symphony concerts off to a dramatic start
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony are making the most of their remaining concerts together. That much was clear on Friday, May 23, at Davies Symphony Hall, as the outgoing music director led the first in a monthlong series of performances marking the end of his tenure with the orchestra. The weekend's program, which repeats through Sunday, May 25, is anchored by a dramatic but nuanced reading of Igor Stravinsky's 'The Firebird' and highlighted by soloist Isabelle Faust's beautiful and well-characterized playing in Alban Berg's Violin Concerto. Like he did in 2022 performances with the Symphony, Salonen has elected to present Stravinsky's complete ballet score, rather than the popular suite from 1919 that cuts about 25 minutes of music. This decision means scenic moments that require inventiveness to pull off in concert feature alongside musical highlights. More Information Esa-Pekka Salonen's Final Concerts Salonen Conducts 'The Firebird': San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 24; 2 p.m. Sunday, May 25. $49-$199. Esa-Pekka Salonen & Hilary Hahn: San Francisco Symphony. 2 p.m. Thursday, May 29; 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 30; 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1. $49-$350. Salonen Conducts Sibelius 7: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. June 6-7; 2 p.m. June 8. $49-$179. Salonen Conducts Mahler 2: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, June 12-14. $145-$399. All shows are at Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit On Friday, these extended scenes crackled with energy and purpose, driven by Salonen's vivid dramatic imagination. The performance brilliantly elucidated the work's overall structure, with the conductor masterfully restraining even the fully orchestrated moments. This careful pacing built tension until the inevitable climax in the 'Infernal Dance,' which the musicians delivered with maximum ferocity. Although interpretations generally adhere to Stravinsky's plentiful metronome markings, Salonen pushed the tempo at the acceleration into the fast coda of the dance, adding to the excitement. Alternatively, in the finale, he slowed the tempo down to the specified molto pesante (very heavy) but held the last chord for almost a full 10 seconds as the orchestra built the sound in a finely graded crescendo. In the concert's first half, Salonen conducted the first Symphony performance of 'Chorale,' a 2002 work by his longtime friend and fellow Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, who conceived the piece as an intro to Berg's Violin Concerto. It takes off from the same J.S. Bach chorale harmonization that Berg used, but Lindberg reimagines it with a dense and intricate orchestration style that is characteristic of his work. Salonen imparted refinement to a score that could easily suffer from being overplayed by a less attentive conductor. The orchestra handled the incredibly difficult runs in the woodwinds and strings with utmost clarity. The work concludes with a beautiful if unconventional cadence to a sustained major chord, anticipating exactly the manner in which Berg ends his piece. The Austrian composer's 1935 concerto demands a soloist like Faust, who was all in on characterizing the musical material and sharing it, rather than seizing control and showing off. The piece is a portrait of Manon Gropius, who died at 18; she was the daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler Werfel (composer Gustav Mahler's widow). In a performance as good as Friday night's, the music captures the moods and manners of the girl so vividly that a listener can almost see her. The passionate but highly contrasting first movement played to Faust's strengths. From the opening arpeggios, rendered almost shyly and with minimal vibrato, she deployed a variety of tone and phrasing that Salonen and the orchestra only amplified. This performance had exquisite balance and clarity, with even the forceful brass-heavy moments making their point without going over the top. The second movement opens wildly but shifts in the middle to a set of variations on the Bach chorale 'Es ist genug' (It is enough). Though mainly quiet, this is the emotional center of the piece, played here with extraordinary intensity. Toward the end, concertmaster Alexander Barantschik took up the theme and then handed it off seamlessly to Faust, who extended the melody into her instrument's upper reaches as the orchestra sank down to a cadence. It was a breathtaking way to take leave of Berg's masterpiece. As is his custom when acknowledging applause, Salonen joined the first row of violins, rather than standing in front of them. But during Friday's encore bow, the orchestra didn't stand as requested, giving him the solo moment he had tried to dodge. He seemed a bit surprised, but he shouldn't have been. The Symphony musicians know how special this time with Salonen has been, and they're marking the end of an era in the best way they can. Up next, Salonen partners with violinist Hilary Hahnr in concerts Thursday-Sunday, May 29-June 1, followed by the conductor leading Jean Sibelius' Symphony No. 7 on June 6-8.
San Francisco Chronicle
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Esa-Pekka Salonen and S.F. Symphony release new recordings on Apple Music
As Esa-Pekka Salonen reaches the beginning of the end of his tenure as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, his work with the institution is being further memorialized on Apple Music Classical. The music platform has released Salonen and the Symphony's performance of Jean Sibelius' ' Finlandia,' recorded live in concert March 14-16, for fans to stream. Three additional digital-only spatial audio recordings are set to release on the Apple Music Classical app in the coming months. Igor Stravinsky's ' Symphony in Three Movements ' will be made available on July 4, followed by Sibelius' Symphony No. 1 on Aug. 15, and Salonen's Cello Concerto featuring principal cello Rainer Eudeikis, which does not have a release date yet. They are all produced through SFS Media, the Symphony's audio-visual label. The Symphony began its partnership with Apple Music Classical upon its release in 2023, and Salonen and the orchestra have previously released 11 recordings through the platform, including compositions by composers Anders Hillborg, Elizabeth Ogonek and Ottorino Respighi. Apple Music Classical is available for free to most Apple Music subscribers and allows its users to make playlists, utilize optimal search features, and enjoy high-quality immersive audio. Salonen's final shows with the Symphony are nearing as the 2024-25 season draws to a close, but classical music fans have a few more opportunities to catch the conductor in person. He is scheduled to conduct Stravinsky's 'The Firebird' Friday, May 23, through Sunday, May 25, and his last scheduled performances will be of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, 'Resurrection,' on June 12-14. The Finnish conductor and composer took over the music director position from Michael Tilson Thomas in 2020 and announced his departure from the Symphony last spring. He attributed his decision to differences with leadership, stating that he does 'not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.' Salonen currently has no plans to join the forthcoming season's lineup, not even to return for a guest appearance.
