The San Francisco Symphony courts talent from far and wide — and occasionally from home.
From 2006 to 2009, a young James Gaffigan spent three seasons as the orchestra’s associate conductor. Now 45, he holds music directorships at two opera houses in Europe, where his career has bloomed. Until recently, though, the New York-born Gaffigan had rarely conducted music from the U.S.
That made his return to San Francisco especially gratifying as he conducted two American pieces on his program with the Symphony this week, starting with a top-notch performance of Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) on Thursday, Jan. 9, at Davies Symphony Hall.
Mazzoli, who was born in Pennsylvania, catapulted to fame after the success of her ambitious 2016 opera Breaking the Waves. This concert had room only for a short curtain-raiser from her, but Sinfonia, a silty dreamscape of Baroque motifs, made a memorable one.
The title refers to the Italian word for “symphony,” but Mazzoli makes clever use of an older definition of “sinfonia.” In the 1600s, it was another name for the hurdy-gurdy, a cranked, droning fiddle. The wheezing harmonicas included in Mazzoli’s score are only a few among the innovations that make Sinfonia a sonic world apart. Standard instruments, too, create novel timbres that come across in recorded performances of the work. During this expertly balanced live performance on Thursday, these sounds were electrifying.
Here, Gaffigan conducted with his hands. Elsewhere, he enlisted a baton. But always, he led with his body, in sweeping movements equally suited to the contours of the other American piece on the program: Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto.
It’s not for nothing that this 20th-century piece has captured millions of hearts. Barber, a prolific composer of songs, had a knack for melody. In fact, at the time of the piece’s composition in 1940, the first two movements were criticized as unsuitable for violin — as if it’s possible to sing too well on this exceptionally melodic instrument.
In the hands of Ray Chen, the superstar Taiwanese Australian violinist, these movements demanded attention. From the naive first theme of the opening Allegro, the playing was rhapsodic, with rapid vibrato and razor-sharp sound. Yet the music seems to look back, as if withdrawing in reverie. Barber, only 30 when he penned this concerto, was already an old soul.
The orchestra sounded lovely in the elegiac slow movement. But Chen’s intensity of expression here, though impressive in its own right, was more at home in the explosive finale, a dazzling moto perpetuo with which Barber stuck it to his staid commissioners. It brought the audience at Davies to its feet.
Some degree of breathlessness may be in order when performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, which followed after intermission. Written in 1944, just a few years after Barber’s concerto, the piece premiered in Moscow to the tune of a celebratory salvo of artillery nearby. The Russian forces had crossed into Germany; World War II would soon be over. Try as one might to savor the music’s taunting dissonances and cartoonish clunkings, the performance went too quickly on Thursday to have had much character.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
