Mired in discouraging news for the past six months, the San Francisco Symphony has been badly in need of something to celebrate. Whatever one thinks of the organization’s annual Opening Night Gala — an occasion to pony up for pricey tickets to support the orchestra’s fundraising, to dress up and party and hear some generally crowd-pleasing music — this year’s version came with particularly pointed urgency.
First and most importantly, the concert on Wednesday, Sept. 25, marked the official beginning of the end for Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who in March announced his resignation, effective at the conclusion of the 2024–2025 season. A strike by the Symphony Chorus scuttled all three performances of Verdi’s Requiem last week, so as a result, the gala was not only the ceremonial but actual opening of the season.
Choristers took advantage of this, leafleting and eager to tell their side of things in front of Davies Symphony Hall as patrons arrived for the fete.
Inside the venue, after sipping bubbly and munching on finger food as DJ Lady Fingaz provided upbeat pop tunes in the crowded lobby, audience members took their seats for what would be an 85-minute, intermission-free program.
Since no one knew what the atmosphere in the hall would be, Salonen’s first entrance was a kind of litmus test. The applause was muted and reserved, making one wonder if some listeners have already accepted his departure and disengaged to a certain extent. That would be a pity. Salonen and the orchestra have plenty of fertile ground to explore in the coming months. The vitality of their connection was manifest in the program’s opening selection, an excerpt from Sergei Prokofiev’s dramatic ballet score to Romeo and Juliet.
With an opening salvo of dissonant chords that epitomized the fated enmity of the “Montagues and Capulets,” Salonen led his mighty brasses into the fray, which only made the hushed string pianissimos that followed more achingly tender. The trombones and tuba gave way to gliding strings and woodwinds. A deliberate tempo later on made the headlong finish pantingly breathless. Here, in about 10 minutes, was dreamy, impetuous young love fully fleshed out. There was more of it to come.
But first, it was showtime for celebrity pianist Lang Lang, in the house to solo in Camille Saint-Saëns’ flashily virtuosic Piano Concerto No. 2.
Right away, with some thunderous bass notes that might have made Sergei Rachmaninoff blush, the pianist staked out his turf. In a performance that ranged from lead-handed and eccentrically accented to exquisitely feathery and dazzlingly fleet, Lang pulled listeners in. They rewarded him with applause after each movement.
The first-movement cadenza was by turns pensive and brittle. The scherzo, which opens with a comically grave colloquy of timpani and piano, was highly characterized but never quite playful. The closing Presto was a marvel of delicacy and fire, annealed in exquisite accord with the orchestra.
No account of a Lang Lang performance can omit his stage demeanor. While the histrionics have toned down over the years, the soloist still sometimes lets a hand fly up like a raptor or rise to linger midair and seemingly conduct a passage. Some fortissimo chords got the stamping of his left foot to drive them home.
An even more gratifying Prokofiev excerpt followed, with Salonen and his band delivering the musical highlight of the night — a fierce, slashing “Death of Tybalt.” As dreadful as the killing is in Shakespeare’s original play, the snarling brasses and caustic strings here gave the moment a terrifying, ruthless intensity that only music played this way can express. It was a shame that two additional selections from Romeo and Juliet, originally scheduled on the program, had to be cut for time.
Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals closed the program. It was not a felicitous choice, either practically or artistically. After a full 10 minutes spent getting both pianos onstage as audience members wandered the hall, Lang was joined by his wife, Gina Alice Redlinger, for the dual keyboard and orchestra work. He, not surprisingly, outshone her. The animals came to life unevenly. The shimmering “Aquarium” movement, the offstage cuckoo (touchingly voiced by clarinetist Matthew Griffith), and cellist Rainer Eudeikis’s lovely singing swan lingered.
Summoned back for repeated curtain calls, the piano-playing couple sat down at one keyboard for a single encore, a propulsive, rubato-rich account of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5. It was a bright note to end on amid what is shaping up to be a dark period for the Symphony.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
