SAN FRANCISCO — Saturday night, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted his San Francisco Symphony in a staggering performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, known as the “Resurrection.” It was a ferocious performance and an exalted one of gripping intensity.
This is a symphony emblematic for Mahler of life and death, an urgent questioning of why we are here. After 80 minutes of the highest highs and lowest lows, of falling in and out of love with life, of smelling the most sensual roses on the planet in a search for renewal, resurrection arrives in a blaze of amazement.
Mahler has no answers for the purpose of life. His triumph, and Salonen’s in his overpowering performance, is in the divine glory of keeping going, keeping asking.
The audience responded with a stunned and tumultuous standing ovation. The musicians pounded their feet on the Davies Symphony Hall stage, resisting Salonen’s urgings to stand and take a bow.
It was no longer his San Francisco Symphony. After five years as music director, Salonen had declined to renew his contract, saying he didn’t share the board of trustees’ vision of the future.
“I have only two things to say,” Salonen told the crowd before exiting the stage.
“First: Thank you.
“Second: You’ve heard what you have in this city. This amazing orchestra, this amazing chorus. So take good care of them.”
Salonen, who happens to be a bit of a tech nerd and is a science-fiction fan, had come to San Francisco because he saw the Bay Area as a place where the future is foretold and the city as a place that thinks differently and turns dreams into reality.
Here he would continue the kind of transformation of the orchestra into a vehicle for social and technological good that he had begun in his 17 years as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was to be a glorious experiment in arts and society in a city presumably ready to reclaim its own past glory.
He had the advantage of following in the symphonic footsteps of Michael Tilson Thomas, who for 25 years had made the orchestra a leader in reflecting the culture of its time and place. Salonen brought in a team of young, venturesome “creative partners” from music and tech. He enlisted architect Frank Gehry to rethink concert venues for the city. He put together imaginative and ambitious projects with director Peter Sellars. He made fabulous recordings.
There were obstacles. The COVID-19 pandemic meant the cancellation of what would have been Tilson Thomas’ own intrepid farewell celebration five years ago — a production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” with a set by Gehry and staged by James Darrah (the daring artistic director of Long Beach Opera). Salonen’s first season had to be streamed during lockdown but became the most technologically imaginative of any isolated orchestra.
Like arts organizations everywhere and particularly in San Francisco, which has had a harder time than most bouncing back from the pandemic, the San Francisco Symphony had its share of budgetary problems. But it also had, in Salonen, a music director who knew a thing or two about how to get out of them.
He had become music director of the L.A. Phil in 1992, when the city was devastated by earthquake, riots and recession. The building of Walt Disney Concert Hall was about to be abandoned. The orchestra built up in the next few years a deficit of around $17 million. The audience, some of the musicians and the press needed awakening.
Salonen was on the verge of resignation, but the administration stood behind him, believing in what he and the orchestra could become. With the opening of Disney Hall in 2003, the L.A. Phil transformed Los Angeles.
And for that opening, Salonen chose Mahler’s “Resurrection” for the first of the orchestra’s subscription series of concerts. Rebirth in this thrillingly massive symphony for a massive orchestra and chorus, along with soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, was writ exceedingly large, transparent and loud. On Oct. 30, 2003, with L.A. weathering record heat and fires, Salonen’s Mahler exulted a better future.
Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in Davies Symphony Hall on Saturday.
(Brandon Patoc / San Francisco Symphony)
The San Francisco Symphony has not followed the L.A. Phil example. It did not put its faith and budget in Salonen’s vision, despite five years of excitement. It did not show the city how to rise again. Next season is the first in 30 years that appears to be without a mission.
In Disney 22 years ago, Salonen drew attention to the sheer transformative power of sound. At the same time Tilson Thomas had turned the San Francisco Symphony into the country’s most expansive Mahler orchestra, and it was only a few months later that he performed the Second Symphony and recorded it in Davies Symphony Hall in a luminously expressive account. That recording stands as a reminder of the hopes back then of a new century.
Salonen’s more acute approach, not exactly angry but exceptionally determined, was another kind of monument to the power of sound. In quietest, barely audible passages, the air in the hall had an electric sense of calm before the storm. The massive climaxes pinned you to the wall.
The chorus, which appears in the final movement to exhort us to cease trembling and prepare to live, proved its own inspiration. The administration all but cost-cut the singers out of the budget until saved by an anonymous donor. The two soloists, Heidi Stober and Sasha Cooke, soared as needed.
Salonen moves on. Next week he takes the New York Philharmonic on an Asia tour. At Salzburg this summer, he and Sellars stage Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,” a project he began with the San Francisco Symphony. At the Lucerne Festival, he premieres his Horn Concerto with the Orchestre de Paris instead of the San Francisco Symphony, as originally intended.
Saturday’s concert had begun with a ludicrous but illuminating announcement to “sit back and relax as Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts your San Francisco Symphony.”
Salonen, instead, offered a wondrous city a wake-up call.
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