This time last year, the San Francisco Symphony’s conductor laureate, Herbert Blomstedt, withdrew from a set of concerts he was slated to lead at Davies Symphony Hall. The nonagenarian had suffered a fall in December 2023 that sidelined him from engagements here and around the world. Many no doubt assumed his lengthy and stellar career, which included a decade as the Symphony’s music director (1985–1995), had reached its natural end.
Assumptions, when it comes to the indefatigable Blomstedt, are a bad bet.
The conductor, 97, was back on the Davies stage on Thursday, Jan. 30, for the first of three scheduled performances of symphonies by Schubert and Brahms, center-cut programming for an artist who has long specialized in the German and Austrian classical repertoire.
Supported on and off the stage by concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, Blomstedt ascended the podium, turned to acknowledge the afternoon crowd’s warm welcome, and settled down on a padded stool to get back to business.
An hour and 50 minutes later, when he brought Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 to a decisive and declarative end, cheering audience members renewed their gratitude and connection. With a wide grin and a hand pressed to his heart, Blomstedt responded in kind.
That eventful last movement of the Brahms saw the conductor enacting his deeply considered, almost architectural approach. By severely slowing the early plucked string passage, Blomstedt was all but saying, “Be patient. Just wait and see.” Gradually, by ramping up the tempos and the tension, highlighting a horn passage here, a woodwind interpolation there, the musical arches began to expand and stretch toward their destination. When the famous, ravishing melody emerged, Blomstedt and the orchestra drove toward a shining, exultant finish that affirmed Brahms’s unmistakable debt to Beethoven.
There were fresh pleasures elsewhere. Seating the first and second violin sections on opposite sides of the stage, with the basses, cellos, and violas fanned out from left to right in between, yielded some lovely sonorities. A colloquy of the two violin sections in the Andante movement was especially choice. So was Barantschik’s tenderly voiced violin solo. The somber heartbeat of the first movement, thumped out by timpanist Edward Stephan, fed into some sharp, pungent string attacks.
For all its carefully marshaled design, this performance of the Brahms was also marked by balance issues, unsteady entrances, and fuzzy cohesion. The overzealous woodwinds turned shrill at various points. A pedal-point horn note drew too much attention to itself. Such details marred the overall construction.
Conducting without a baton and signaling his wishes with restrained but clearly articulated gestures, Blomstedt seemed more firmly in control in Schubert’s Symphony No. 5. With a light, sure touch, he tracked this ebullient work’s nimble shifts in mood, enlivening key changes, and false cadences. But there was a strain of seriousness through it all as well, as if to remind listeners that even while Schubert wrote the piece at age 19, he sensed mortality’s creeping shade. (The composer would die at 31.)
A bright, string-forward sound took hold in the first movement, the playfulness present but muted. The Andante that followed was masterly, the soft-edged phrases delicately poised and set off against each other. In the middle section of this movement, the strings seemed to ponder where they’d come from, setting up the nostalgic, bittersweet return and transformation of the opening subject.
The woodwinds, more temperate than in the Brahms, stood out in the crisply accented third movement. When a minor-key storm broke out in the final movement, Blomstedt and the players leaned into Schubert’s inexhaustible invention.
Here, too, there were some miscues and uncertainties along the way. Yet somehow these seemed almost youthful, overeager. Age is just a number. Music, as it always does, starts fresh with every downbeat.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
