As contract tensions between talent and management escalate, it’s hard to see what the immediate future holds for the San Francisco Symphony. But one thing is clear: Musicians stick together.
Long before any notes of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem were sung at Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday, Nov. 16, the orchestra’s instrumentalists led a long ovation in support of their colleagues in the Symphony Chorus. It was a heartening show of solidarity in an evening that otherwise felt disjointed.
These fine performers have had much to contend with over the past many months. After a three-day strike in September that canceled what were to be the season’s opening performances of Verdi’s Requiem, the Chorus’s 32 union members are still without a contract.
The choristers made their case, via leaflets distributed outside the hall before the weekend’s concerts, for a multiyear agreement that preserves the current performing minimums and provides for compensation growth. During the program’s first performance on Friday, Nov. 15, Symphony management sent an email to ticketholders detailing its position of maintaining current wage rates for choristers and reducing the Chorus performances from 26 to 23 in the current season. (The American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents the union singers, has since published its response.)
Meanwhile, the orchestra members’ own contract is set to expire on Tuesday, Nov. 19. As if this weren’t enough, the musicians are also mourning the loss of soprano Aimée Puentes, a longtime Chorus member who died last month.
In stressful times, the first line of defense is a good leader. Guest conductor Kazuki Yamada had the unenviable task of uniting everyone for these first concerts back for the Chorus, and he unfortunately seemed to struggle in the role during Saturday’s performance. The 45-year-old conductor got his start as a choirboy in his native Japan; he’s now music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, a position once held by the great Simon Rattle. Yamada surely knows this music well, yet under his leadership, Fauré’s Requiem — and the rest of the pieces on the program — failed to cohere.
Indeed, in this performance of an inherently beautiful piece, it was difficult to find much beauty. From Yamada’s first downbeat — a gesture too ambiguous for the unison declamation to land — the ensemble pulled apart. The textures were muddy, phrases were directionless, and tempos were punishingly slow. The Chorus, prepared by Director Jenny Wong, sang with inconsistent vowels and, shockingly, the occasional insistence of individual voices. It sounded like a first reading.
The other pieces on the program had their bright spots, and in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major, that light was soloist Hélène Grimaud.
To be sure, circumstances weren’t ideal. In the slow movement, Yamada couldn’t quite get the strings to move; in the finale, his conducting seemed to weigh the music down. The balance was off. But when Grimaud played alone, she revealed herself to be the same musician audiences have admired ever since her Symphony debut in 1993 (the same year she released her magnificent first recording of this piece). She phrased with utmost rhythmic nuance, especially in the unaccompanied aria of the slow movement and in her encore, the Bagatelle Op. 1, No. 2, by contemporary Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. Her technique was flawless as ever; the first-movement piano cadenza, a fluent cascade of virtuosic arpeggiation and trills, was a joy.
The program had another highlight in the U.S. premiere of Entwine by London-based composer Dai Fujikura. In this short 2021 work, Fujikura takes fleeting gestures of not entirely unfamiliar sounds — the woodwinds playing flutter-tongue, the trumpets fanning their mutes — and reconfigures them in rich new harmonies. At first, the instrumental consorts seem to be in their own worlds, but gradually, the music connects them.
Some of the entrances were unintentionally blurry, but with the help of Yamada’s introductory spoken remarks, the piece’s premise — a composer’s longing for community during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — came across. Put yourself back in that time: no gathering, certainly no touching. “Maybe,” Yamada said, “through music we can do something.”
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
