MINORITIES AT WORK, HALOES AROUND THE MOON
Lost in the hurrahs of the San Francisco Symphony concerts this week was emergence of an even more significant course change this season: The unprecedented emphasis on creativity by women and minorities, front and center. Conductors like Xian Zhang, Elim Chan, C.M. Prieto, Masaaki Suzuki, Daniel Bartholomew-Peyser and Jose Hernandez; soloists like Leif-Aruhn-Solen, Conrad Tao, and Sterling Elliott; and composers like Gabriela Lena Frank, Gabriella Smith, Florence Price, Jose Gonzalez-Granero and Elizabeth Ogonek. It’s as if this one season were to atone for a century of neglect in so many orchestras here and elsewhere, with the message that the doors are open to any with great talent. A few old-timers can yet recall the era in the 1960s when major orchestras still had on stage only one woman member—inevitably the harpist—and neither blacks nor Latinos.
This week’s concert led by diminutive Elim Chan from Hong Kong was a rousing one, leading off with the ethereal world premiere “Moondog” by Elizabeth Ogonek. The title refers to the halo sometimes around the moon, suggesting a wondrous celestial phenomenon. This ushered in a grand interplay in subtleties of the two women, with Ogonek literally producing haloes of sound in her score, via whirlwinds of strings and wispy effects on harp, shimmering vibraphone and temple gongs.
In her 10-minute piece, Minnesotan Ogonek showed that you need neither earthquakes, marching Roman legions or volcanoes to produce music going straight to the soul. And the orchestra followed Chan and Ogonek quite seamlessly.
Chan was no less eloquent in the Prokofieff Violin Concerto No. 2; I’d love to play under her deft and precise stickwork. The work stemming from the mid-1930s transforms from sounds reminiscent of the great ”Romeo and Juliet” ballet in the first movement to a modern finale some 20 minutes later, as if Prokofieff and Igor Stravinsky were suddenly Siamese twins joined at the waist. (Neither of the composer’s musical personae satisfied the imperious Josef Stalin, who incredibly censured Prokofieff even after luring him back to the USSR with considerable effort from the US.)
None of all this surpassed one of the great soloistic triumphs as the SFS season neared its midpoint: The Canadian midcareer violin soloist James Ehnes. With his Stradivarius clearly made for smaller halls than Davies, Ehnes produced lyricism along with dazzling flights of virtuosity, showing that pianist-composer Prokofieff was as adept at challenging violinists as pianists.
Ehnes mastered the rapid-fire finale’s challenges, in all their splashy, effusive dimensions and brought down the house, with the orchestra showering rare accolades by tapping their feet on the floor. Equally rare was allowing him to play two encores: Paganini’s combustible Caprice No. 16, and the far calmer excerpt from Bach’s Second Sonata.
The concert ended with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, no longer subtitled “Little Russia,” as the term suggests a slight of the thoroughly independent, hard-striving nation of Ukraine, besieged today by Russia.
MUSIC NOTES—Occupying the longest-vacant principal’s chair in the SFS was cellist Rainer Eudeikis, a Texan formerly principal with the Atlanta and Utah Symphonies….Even in death, Prokofieff was marginalized in his homeland. Dying the same day as dictator Stalin, his obituary was totally suppressed for weeks, though widely seen as his nation’s number one composer at the time. Moral: If we are dying, we need to pick a carefully chosen date!
San Francisco Symphony led by guest Elim Chan in works of Prokofieff, Ogonek and Tchaikovsky, Jan. 12-14, heard on the 13th. Davies Symphony Hall, S.F. For info, call (415) 864 6600, or visit online: sfsymphony.org.
