Esa-Pekka Salonen
Among my most-read blogs is “What’s An Orchestra For?” – Mulling Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Resignation from the San Francisco Symphony.” I posted it on March 26, 2024, and it still attracts readers practically every day. The topic is the abrupt departure of a genuine music director propagating a tangible and timely artistic vision. I wrote that this story was “dominating classical-music news because Salonen made no secret why he quit: a falling out with the board over his elaborate artistic plans and their cost.”
That would seem a terminus but alas there is a sequel. Because my daughter Maggie happens to live in San Francisco, I went on the web the other day to have a look at the San Francisco Symphony’s upcoming season. What I think I discovered was a dispiriting provincialism driven by evident or imagined desperation.
Desperate orchestras hug three survival strategies. They engage big-name soloists with enormous fees. They program a bloat of standard repertoire. They schedule as many pops events as their institutional conscience can tolerate. Cumulatively, this is a short-term fix that risks destructive longterm consequences.
San Francisco’s biggest stars for 2025-26 are Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, and Yuja Wang. Meanwhile, the orchestra is conducting a music-director search. There are 24 guest conductors, many of whom are young (it matters little these days that conductors ripen with age). One who is not, Jaap van Zweden, has the most assignments. Judging from his brief New York Philharmonic tenure, he is not a likely cultural leader.
Though a plethora of magnificent silent films invite live orchestral accompaniment, the San Francisco Symphony’s countless movie nights include not a single ambitious choice. Here’s a sampling: Vertigo, Barbie, Home Alone, Pirates of the Caribbean, Crouching Tiger– Hidden Dragon. (The South Dakota Symphony this season screens the 1929 Soviet classic The New Babylon with a pit orchestra performing Shostakovich’s hilarious yet shattering score, surely one of the most formidable ever to mate with the moving image.)
For San Francisco’s subscription concerts, the major repertoire at hand includes:
–Tchaikovsky Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 plus the Violin Concerto and First Piano Concerto
–Grieg’s Piano Concerto
–Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
–Beethoven Symphonies 2, 5, 7, 9
–Mozart Prague and Jupiter Symphonies
–Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Symphony No. 7, and Cello Concerto
–Berlioz Symphonie fantastique
–Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade
—Gershwin Piano Concerto and An American in Paris
–Mahler Symphonies 1 and 9
–Brahms Symphony No. 2
I lived in the Bay Area during the early 1970s, when the San Francisco Symphony and (especially) San Francisco Opera were civic signatures, hosted with pride. Kurt Herbert Adler managed to assemble casts comparable to the Met’s in New York. The house specialized in Wagner, typically under-rehearsed yet ignited by a first-rate East German-based conductor, Otmar Suitner. The singers included Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, Jess Thomas, Thomas Stewart. I less often attended Seiji Ozawa’s San Francisco Symphony concerts, but remember Arnold Schoenberg’s massive Gurrelieder – a bolder undertaking than anything today’s San Francisco Symphony attempts over the course of nine months.
Before and after Ozawa, the orchestra’s music directors included Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, Herbert Blomstedt, Edo de Waart, and Michael Tilson Thomas. San Francisco today – a software mecca — is not the San Francisco I once knew. That may be the main story here. And yet Salonen’s were very likely the most sophisticated programs of any American orchestra. That legacy isn’t just being ignored; it’s likely to be erased.
As for the San Francisco Opera, its season is drastically shorter than half a century ago. But they’re presenting a new production of Wagner’s Parsifal – compared to the Symphony’s diner menu, no small feat. And if there are no glossy names, that may be a sign of health.
Maggie has never had an opportunity to attend Parsifal. I told her that it was the one San Francisco musical event she couldn’t afford to miss.
To read my previous blogs about Salonen and San Francisco, click here, here, and here.
To read a blog questioning the Chicago Symphony’s decision to engage Klaus Makela as “music director,” click here.
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