Music I'm Listening to: Sheku Kanneh-Mason plays Shostakovich

I attended the Friday, June 14, concert at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the San Francisco Symphony doing Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107. Sheku Kanneh-Mason was the soloist. After intermission, the program continued with a short piece by Sofia Gubaidulina called Fairytale Poem for Orchestra and then Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini. 

Kanneh-Mason was interesting to watch. He seemed almost to be in a trance as he played, but he projected confidence and played with great precision that did not sacrifice expressiveness. He finished seemingly exhausted, but played a short encore that I didn't recognize and he didn't say anything about it from the stage. 

On the other hand, Salonen spoke quite extensively after intermission, telling the story behind the Gubaidulina piece, which was written as the score for a children's TV show broadcast in 1971 in the Soviet Union. The protagonist of the story is a piece of chalk bored with the grammar and mathematics it's used for and longing to be used to draw gardens and flowers and castles and the like. Eventually, the chalk is worn down to a stub and thrown away. The chalk stub is picked up and plunged into darkness and the chalk thinks its fate is sealed, but it turns out that it is in the pocket of a young boy, and soon the boy takes the chalk out into the light and starts using it to draw the fanciful scenes the chalk has dreamed of. The chalk is so happy, that it doesn't mind being used up entirely and disappearing. The music was interesting, using a great deal of percussion and of varied textures. I rather enjoyed it. 

In contrast, Francesca da Rimini was an unfamiliar piece that didn't leave much of an impression on me. The Shostakovich, although played at the beginning, was the centerpiece of this concert. In the upper balcony, behind the orchestra, a couple of people in the audience brought signs. One said "We love Salonen." Another simply said "STAY!" Many are hoping Salonen with reconsider his apparent decision to leave as music director at the end of next season.