Music I'm Listening to: Daniil Trifonov with the San Francisco Symphony

Last night (February 21, 2025) I had the pleasure of attending the San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall. On the program were a new piece, Strange Beasts (a San Francisco Symphony Commission and World Premiere) by the appropriately named composer Xavier Musik, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 (with soloist Daniil Trifonov), and, after intermission, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. 

Strange Beasts was interesting for its wide range of aural textures and the sense of unease it created (in several places I was reminded of a Bernard Herrmann score), this heightened by angular photographs of Los Angeles projected above the orchestra, images taken by the composer. Muzik spoke before the performance, explaining that he suffers from anxiety, that, if left unchecked, tends toward catastrophic imaginings and that composing and photography help him to stay sane. He said he imagines the looming buildings in the slide show (many projected upside down) as being like monsters or the strange beasts of the title of his composition. While I thought the photographs mostly ordinary snapshots of no special interest in themselves, the way they were projected, rapidly changing, worked fairly well with the repeated crescendos of unsettling sound welling up in the music. I thought Strange Beasts was longer than it needed to be, but I'll be interested to watch this young man's career. I think in places it was very successful even if it seemed a bit rambling and without structure (at least without structure discernible to me). 

Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2 followed with Trifonov at the keyboard. His manner on stage was serious but, at the same time, he gave the impression of being on the verge of spinning slowly out of control. He seemed nervous and awkward. At the piano, however, Trifonov was electric. I was very impressed by the clarity of his phrasing despite the very fast tempos in the concerto. He got an extended standing ovation and came back to play two encores, the first I think was from one of Prokofiev's piano sonatas, but it was not something familiar. The second I recognized immediately, a piece from Prokofiev's Cinderella, that seemed perfect to me. 

After intermission, Salonen conducted the orchestra members in a tight performance of The Rite of Spring. Overall, it was an excellent concert, but that second encore may have been the highlight of the evening. 

Music I'm Listening to: The San Francisco Symphony with Leonidas Kavakos

I attended the September 28 performance of the San Francisco Symphony, at Davies Symphony Hall, part of an ongoing Stravinsky Festival. MTT conducted Petruschka, The Rite of Spring, and the Violin Concerto. Leonidas Kavakos was the soloist in the concerto.

It was fun to hear Petruschka live for the first time, but I was more  interested in the rest of the program as this was my second time hearing the San Francisco Symphony doing each of the other two pieces. Back in 2013, I heard Leila Josefowicz play the Stravinsky concerto (my comments on that concert here) and heard The Rite of Spring just last summer, with Susanna Mälkki conducting (comments here). I was curious to hear these two pieces again and with MTT conducting.

I don't know what it is about MTT. I know he's popular. He's won multiple Grammy Awards. I just don't get the way he conducts. I thought The Rite of Spring oddly static in the first half. It's a piece that should be marching forward, relentlessly, and he managed to make it seem like it was standing still at times. I always feel a disconnect between him and the orchestra (with one notable exception, his brilliant reading of the Mahler Fifth Symphony I heard back in March this year). In the second half of The Rite of Spring, things finally seemed to be in gear and the audience was very appreciative, but this performance, while enjoyable, didn't leave me with anything of the excitement I felt hearing virtually the same musicians under Mälkki's baton back in June of 2017.

I felt kind of the same way about the concerto. The opening chord—the chord that opens each of the concerto's movements—seemed weak. It should come as a shock. I had never heard Kavakos play before or even heard his name, so I went into the concert with an open mind. After the initial chord, I was prepared to be disappointed, but, it got better. Again it took some time for the players and the conductor to convincingly join forces, or so it seemed to me. In the end, I liked Kavakos. That said, this performance didn't have the fire of the 2013 performance I attended with Josefowicz on the violin.