Making a concert program is always a question of mix and match because each piece has to stand on its own merits and contribute to the program’s overall effect / affect. The San Francisco Symphony’s outgoing music director Esa-Pekka Salonen programmed a brand new piece and two 20th century masterworks at Davies Symphony Hall this February. But the real news here was that the two “old ” ones by Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky blew the brand new one by the largely unknown young composer Xavier Musik out of the water, and it didn’t help that he gave a short intro for his piece in overalls straight out of The Beverly Hillbillies. His seventeen minute curtain raiser Strange Beasts was apparently his personal “narrative “about his COVID anxiety as well as a semi abstract “mapping” of places in Los Angeles accompanied by his enlarged photos projected above the players. But I knew we were in trouble when the SFS musicians, including its huge string section, swallowed the hall’s huge stage scant seconds before Esa Pekka–Salonen’s downbeat, But what was the sound like? Generally loud, abrasive, or canned, even after its multi million dollar aural “facelift” many years ago, Maybe Muzik’s writing reflected the startling sounds that composers like the Franco Burgundian Edgard Varese, or the Mexican Silvestre Revueltas cooked up decades ago ? Or maybe he encountered their work when he studied at Cal Arts, in Southern California , and if so, his Strange Beasts, was a pallid echo of these uncompromising masters. And the audience reaction? A smattering of applause mostly from the cheaper seats. I hate to say it but this was one of the worst pieces I’ve ever heard — or rather been subjected to.
And then all of a sudden, the massive orchestra in the Muzik seemed to disappear as a “new” one took its place, large but not so large, and then the young Russian soloist Daniil Trifonov’s piano was there center stage.This change in scale suited Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto # 2 elusive, haunted ” a private bell for inexplicable needs “, Dada poet Tristan Tzara’s definition of his art. Prokofiev’s music also plays with scale but not in the literal / pictorial ways that Mahler used in, say his 4th symphony because Prokofiev’s sound is just as physical as structural, and — metaphoric. His Piano Concerto in G minor is primarily about love and death, but how could it not be when Prokofiev dedicated it to his former classmate and pianist friend Maksimilian Shmitgoff who committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. ” At that time I was not always myself, but half –Max. His influence on me was enormous. I was very close to him, and now … I feel completely alone. ” he wrote to Max’s sister. and to an acquaintance. “On April 27,1913 Prokofiev got a note from Max relaying the latest news. “I have shot myself”. On May 9 Prokofiev wrote in his diary. “Eyes open and both temples soaked in blood. Max had been sure of himself; he had not batted an eyelid and his hand was steady. The bullet went straight through the right temple and out the left. A good shot. Bravo. Returning home I inscribed on the score of the Second Piano Concerto ‘ To the memory of Maximillian Anatoleivich Schmidthof ‘.Tomorrow I shall put on a black tie and wear it in memory of my friend.” Prokofiev was known for his biting wit, but he was dead serious here and dedicated his Piano Sonata #2 (1912); the “Allemande” of the Op.12 piano pieces; and the Piano Sonata # 4 (1917), based on themes he wrote in 1908-09 when his friendship with Max was likely near or at its zenith. The Second was a success de scandal — ” We can hear music like this from our cats at home ” ‘noncritic’ noted in his Petersburg Journal review of its premiere in that city’s suburb Pavlovsk, but its originality and tragic power seems to have followed it ever since. Lost in a fire in Prokofiev’s apartment after he’d fled the 1917 Revolution, and completely rewritten in Paris, it has caused a stir whenever it’s performed. I caught the young Russian pianist Stanislav Korchagin scale and control its challenges–both tender and explosive –in his live performance at Moscow’s 2023 Tchaikovsky International Competition on www.youtube.com, and apparently, like many others, I became obsessed with its unique sound and structure, whole sections running unbidden through my head. We tend to think of art as something on the edge but not central, and the Prokofiev Second is clearly both because it gets under your skin. A sigh from clarinet 1 and bassoon 1 in 4/4 — marked “piano”, or “soft”, supported by a simple pizzicato in all of the strings followed by a slow undulating figure in the piano — in 12/8, in the left hand, then right — which sounds like it could be coming from the Finnish forest where Max met his end. And then it grows and we’re drawn in — there are no metronome indications, but the marking “narrante “, or telling a story “con gran eleganza ” — as the music begins its march to the massive cadenza which seals its fate in Movement I and in cadenza 2 in the last Movement IV with its myriad subtleties — the Russian folk song ” The Birch Tree ” which threads its way through the concerto gets many affecting variations, and there are hints of the Latin Dies Irae chant, and what may be oblique references to Wagner’s Liebestod.
Any good work can be seen from multiple vantage points and the Second is no exception. Russian pianist Danill Trifonov’s performance with the SFS was nowhere as interior as Korchagin’s, but equally valid, with Trifonov’s famous, or infamous, technique, sometimes integrated, sometimes not, driving through every musical hurdle of this astonishing work. We seem to be living in an era blessed with superlative pianists like — Yuja Wang fondly known as Bang Bang — and the hardly known Uzbeki Behzod Abduraimov. Salonen’s leadership here was firm, but not inspired. The orchestra’s explosion at the end of the cadenza in Movement I felt more or less motivated , but not loud enough; ditto the second cadenza which caps the concerto’s last and final Movement IV which should jolt the listener no matter how often he or she has experienced it, otherwise what’s the point? The Prokofiev Second seems to be inching towards its deserved repertory status with lots of expert live performances popping up seemingly everywhere, and clear, yet highly personal readings by two late great Soviet Russians — Yakov Zak and Nikolai Petrov– and one late great Frenchman — Samson Francois on record and online.
What can one say about one of the most famous, and perhaps seminal ? — I hate “iconic “, sorry — pieces ever written like Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps ( The Rite of Spring ) for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes other than dutifully retelling its riotous premiere in Paris in 1913 which divided audiences about as much as Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto # 2? That’s the gossip bit. But Le Sacre has been a hugely influential masterwork not because composers wrote their own Sacres . but because Stravinsky taught audiences and composers how to listen beyond our cozy Euro-American signposts which had guided and still guide our usual listening habits. Because it’s both a ritual, and dare I say it – a non-western one — which was the exotic perfume that Diaghilev parlayed so successfully in his time.The apogee and the non plus ultra of Stravinsky’s Diaghilev triumvirate — The Firebird ; (1909-1910); Petrouchka (1910-11 ); and Le Sacre ( 1911-13) which was truly new, and arranged old things in a fresh new way, as in the cubism so fashionable then. And Rhythm — layered and/or syncopated; Polytonality as both a structural and contributory “color” element, and extraordinarily effective Orchestration with modal writing sometimes drawn from East European sources like the Lithuanian tune which Stravinsky mines to the hilt in its opening bassoon solo, and elsewhere, and which he was very cagey about discussing. Or as my late great composer-critic friend Virgil Thomson once said to me regarding influence.” You see something you like and you take it! ” Le Sacre is a startling and sophisticated synthesis of sound — the score — and Nijinskyy’s choreography; and the great Russian painter Nicholas Roerich’s original sets and costumes — there’s a museum in a commodious house on New York’s Upper West Side — www.roerich.org — and it rarely disappoints when heard with or without its visual elements, if imaginatively deployed. The big Stravinsky three are obviously highwater marks early in his career, which also included masterworks like Les Noces (1917), and another traversal of The Rite is always more than welcome.
Salonen’s take on it at Davies, he conducted it with the Philharmonia Orchestra in Berkeley some years ago — I wrote it up for www.culturevulture.net– was far more successful, because everything chimed. Two halves of the orchestra standing next to each other and looking directly at the audience as they played their sharply contrasting harmonic / rhythmic ostinati functioning as planes of sound you could also see.
Trifonov’s sole encore was the Gavotte from Prokofiev’s ballet (1940-44) played with charm and apparent love.
23.ii — 5.iv.25 C 2025 MICHAEL MCDONAGH I’m currently working on several large projects including my first collaboration with Italian composer – pianist Alessandro Conti — 1. Catastrophic Consequences, whose text takes off from the Ukraine War; 2. a projected live and streamed remounting of my Speaking Terms ( Bach ) and Love’s A Mess ( Philip Glass’ Songs and Poems for Solo Cello ) with my Uzbeki cellist friend Misha Khalikulov, with help from Glass’ music publisher www.dunvagen.com, and www,wisemusic.com fall ? 2025, And 3. a live recorded performance of my for Mahmoud Darwish , in both my original English version and Arabic translations by my friends Hayat, and my Arabic translator Ayad Kholaifat which will hopefully bring even more luster and attention to this late great Palestinian poet whose work could not be more necessary now. 1; 2; and 3. could possibly be streamed . And oh yes — I’m Michael McDonagh San Francisco www.facebook.com.
