Is Schumann the new Mahler for the San Francisco Symphony?
The question arose Monday, when the orchestra announced its 2015-16 season, with performances and SFS Media recordings of the composer’s four symphonies as a defining tent pole. Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas praised the “inflection, lightness, and spontaneity” of these Romantic repertory staples he hopes to envision anew.
He also reflected on the “imagination it takes to do what’s on the page.” The composer once remarked, MTT said, that he could spend six months writing a piece and nine months doing and re-doing the dynamic markings. The “conflicting instructions” of various performing versions pose an enticing challenge.
Just as the music director felt it was time to embark on his signature Mahler Project a decade and a half ago, he senses a Schumann moment for the ensemble he has led for the past 20 years. “The orchestra is just in the right place to be able to do this now,” he said. Schumann-based chamber concerts involving symphony members will be announced later to fill out this major initiative, dubbed the Schumann Symphony Cycle, devoted to a single composer.
While there was much more news to take in at a season-unveiling press lunch – including commissioned works by Mason Bates, Jörg Widmann, and Ted Hearne; programs celebrating Sibelius on the 150th anniversary of his birth; 20th-century violin concertos by Shostakovich (with Christian Tetzlaff), Bartók (Gidon Kremer), Sibelius (Leonidas Kavakos), and Nielsen (Nikolaj Znaider); unusual extracts from operatic music by Rameau, Mussorgsky, Hans Erich Pfitzner, von Weber and Busoni; and the usual gaudy stream of guest artists and conductors and visiting orchestras (the Royal Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic) – discussion kept circling back to SoundBox, the ingeniously conceived and engineered new performance space in Davies Hall that made such an auspicious debut last December. … discussion kept circling back to SoundBox, the ingeniously conceived and engineered new performance space in Davies Hall.
Few details about the ten multi-disciplinary SoundBox concerts slated for 2015-15 were revealed Members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus will participate. MTT will do some curating (and unwrap some of the video pieces he’s been working on). Tilson Thomas said that “many members of the orchestra have expressed interest in working there,” in ways that go beyond performance.
Knowing that they have a hot, audience-expanding property on their hands, SFS management may well sense that mystery enhances the experience. Discovering the unexpected is a big part of what young, non-subscriber audiences apparently relish about SoundBox.
The new season opens in an unorthodox way, in late August. Following the traditional all-San Francisco concert on Aug. 20 and a pair of Bon Voyage concerts to follow, the orchestra takes off for a lengthy European Festival tour. That will delay the opening night gala to Sept. 24, in a TBA program. MTT will remain on the Davies podium through Oct. 3, the final program in that span featuring Hearne’s Dispatches and Tchaikovsky's “Pathétique” Symphony.
The conductor offered one intriguing teaser about the “most unusual” and “hard-to-identify” sounds” of the Hearne commission: It involves a “prepared cello” between whose strings a wine cork is employed.
Other contemporary works on the bill include John Adams’ The Wound Dresser, with baritone Thomas Hampson, and the first SF Symphony performances of Jukka Tiensuu’s Soma and Guillaume Connesson’s A Glimmer in the Age of Darkness.
As with any season this long and expansive, there’s plenty for all comers. With subscriptions continuing their industry-wide decline, orchestras look for audience appeal wherever they can find it. Beethoven’s “Eroica” and Dvořák’s “New World” symphonies are on the docket. Pianist Emanuel Ax solos in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto. Simon Trpčeski plays the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1. Fans of sacred vocal music have Haydn’s “Lord Nelson” Mass and the Berlioz Requiem to anticipate.
MTT’s theatrical flair, which has increasingly emerged over his tenure here, will be on display in a semi-staged version of Bernstein’s On the Town in May, 2016.
While Schumann may form the symphonic throughline, the orchestra’s music director is not about to turn his back on an abiding commitment to Mahler. Tilson Thomas will conduct Das Lied von der Erde in April, 2016 and close the season with the composer’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection.”
For complete information on the 2015-16 season, visit www.sfsymphony.org or call (415) 864-6000. Subscriptions are currently on sale. Single tickets for specific concerts go on sale July 20.