How does a contemporary composer breathe new life into a 450-year-old musical genre? If you’re San Francisco Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, just add electronics, maracas, and hand drums.
From Oct. 18 to 20, Salonen, an acclaimed composer as well as conductor, led the Symphony in its first performances of his 2017 Cello Concerto. The star of these concerts at Davies Symphony Hall — in addition to Salonen, whose tenure with the orchestra concludes in June 2025 — was the Symphony’s dazzling new principal cello, Rainer Eudeikis.
Eudeikis’s deft solo playing was never eclipsed in Saturday’s performance, which the Chronicle attended. But he did share the spotlight with a constellation of demi-soloists, including a high-pitched clarinet, a low-pitched flute, and most strikingly, bongos and congas, handled by principal percussion player Jacob Nissly, who at one point launched into an improvised groove.
These may be the instruments that pop out of the ensemble texture, but the orchestration of this concerto truly shines in a subtler way. A cello simply can’t hammer away like a piano or pierce like a violin — a balance problem Salonen spins into a worthwhile artistic conceit. In his composer’s note accompanying the concerto, he describes the solo cello line as resembling “a comet,” leaving a tail across the ensemble that always seems to be expanding. It’s tricky to say where one cloud of sound ends and another begins, and when the instruments of the orchestra at last come together, they dance heavenward, like shooting stars.
Salonen’s concerto is flashy in another sense. The technical demands of the solo part, written for Yo-Yo Ma, are nearly insurmountable, but 34-year-old Eudeikis, who was hired by Salonen in 2022, rose to the piece’s challenges — and then some. In the most furious passages, his bow never failed to catch the string just so. Every note clicked. Above all, at the highest reaches of his instrument’s fingerboard, he phrased with an otherworldly lyricism that added interest to the electronically enhanced episodes of the concerto — looped sections in which material that the cellist has already played echoes back.
If only Salonen had reserved some of the projectiles for the end of the piece. Listening to the concerto’s finale, you get the uncanny sense that its structure was conceived out of order; its star burns out. But perhaps this is another innovation. After all, it took audiences in previous centuries more than a few tries to appreciate the musical arcs of the other pieces on this weekend’s program: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”) and Claude Debussy’s La mer.
Almost 100 years apart, these works upended the symphonic forms of their respective times. For his bucolic Sixth Symphony, Beethoven composed an unprecedented five movements (symphonies in the 18th and 19th centuries more typically had four). The melodies in this performance flowed vigorously and yet easily, the rivulets in the foreground of the second movement (titled “Scene by the brook”) aptly spreading as the harmonies ventured further upstream.
The squalls never seem to abate in La mer, Debussy’s treacherously deep seaside sketch, which nearly drowned the guest conductor who led the Symphony in the piece earlier this year. Under Salonen, this music — and the second movement (“Play of the Waves”) in particular — had a glamorous sweep. The sound was magnificent and immediate. You could see every glint of the score and almost smell the sea.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
