Isabelle Faust
REVIEW: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Final SF Symphony Concerts Off to a Dramatic Start
From San Francisco Classical Voice
By Michael Zwiebach
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony are making the most of their remaining concerts together.
That much was clear on Friday, May 23, at Davies Symphony Hall, as the outgoing music director led the first in a monthlong series of performances marking the end of his tenure with the orchestra.
The weekend’s program, which repeats through Sunday, May 25, is anchored by a dramatic but nuanced reading of Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird and highlighted by soloist Isabelle Faust’s beautiful and well-characterized playing in Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto.
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The Austrian composer’s 1935 concerto demands a soloist like Faust, who was all in on characterizing the musical material and sharing it, rather than seizing control and showing off. The piece is a portrait of Manon Gropius, who died at 18; she was the daughter of architect Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler Werfel (composer Gustav Mahler’s widow). In a performance as good as Friday night’s, the music captures the moods and manners of the girl so vividly that a listener can almost see her.
The passionate but highly contrasting first movement played to Faust’s strengths. From the opening arpeggios, rendered almost shyly and with minimal vibrato, she deployed a variety of tone and phrasing that Salonen and the orchestra only amplified. This performance had exquisite balance and clarity, with even the forceful brass-heavy moments making their point without going over the top.
The second movement opens wildly but shifts in the middle to a set of variations on the Bach chorale “Es ist genug” (It is enough). Though mainly quiet, this is the emotional center of the piece, played here with extraordinary intensity.
Toward the end, concertmaster Alexander Barantschik took up the theme and then handed it off seamlessly to Faust, who extended the melody into her instrument’s upper reaches as the orchestra sank down to a cadence. It was a breathtaking way to take leave of Berg’s masterpiece.