SCHUBERT 5 & DESSNER VIOLIN CONCERTO

October 21, 22 & 23, 2021

Overview

SF Symphony Collaborative Partners Bryce Dessner—a composer, songwriter, and founding member of the band The National—and violinist Pekka Kuusisto—lauded for bridging genres and bringing fresh energy to concert halls worldwide—join forces for the US premiere of Dessner’s Violin Concerto, an SF Symphony commission. The program opens with Ludwig van Beethoven’s fiery Leonore Overture No. 2, originally written to introduce his only opera Fidelio, and closes with Franz Schubert’s merry Symphony No. 5.

Concert Extras

Pre-Concert Talk: Scott Foglesong will give an “Inside Music” talk from the stage one hour prior to the October 21-23 performances. Free to all concert ticket holders; doors open 15 minutes before.

Off-The-Podium: A post-concert audience Q&A session with moderator Peter Grunberg will be presented from the stage immediately following the concert on October 22. Free to all ticket holders.

At a Glance

Ludwig van Beethoven’s love for opera was lifelong, but the success of the only opera he actually wrote (titled Fidelio, though originally named Leonore) arrived slowly and late. Beethoven went so far as to write four (!) overtures for the opera over the course of a decade. The one played tonight is a distillation of the Fidelio story, tracing in music the path from darkly troubled beginnings to a work of victory. In the daring Leonore No. 2 (1805), Beethoven gives free rein to fantasy, one in which something disturbing remains.

Bryce Dessner notes, “My Violin Concerto was partly inspired by Anne Carson’s essay ‘The Anthropology of Water’, which re-imagines the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.…Something about the practice of composing for orchestra, and writing a violin concerto, felt at times like a musical analog to this pilgrimage.…So, what does it mean for a contemporary artist to make this same journey, and how do these artifacts left behind by other artists inform our own course?…These were thoughts in my mind as I composed this concerto for my dear friend Pekka Kuusisto.”

While Franz Schubert experienced personal setbacks in 1816, notably the failure to land a teaching job in Laibach (now Ljubljana) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's frosty non response to receiving a package of his songs, his powers as a composer continued to grow. The Schubert who wrote the Symphony No. 5, though a very young man whose twentieth birthday was still four months away, was an experienced and thoroughly professional composer. In every way, this symphony is a brilliant achievement, beginning with the breath‑stoppingly original opening gesture.

From notes by Michael Steinberg and Bryce Dessner

For more information, including full program notes, visit the San Francisco Symphony’s digital program book platform at https://sfsymphony.ihubapp.org/ or text “SFS Concert” to 55741.

Artists

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Conductor

Pekka Kuusisto

Violin

San Francisco Symphony

Program

Ludwig van Beethoven

Leonore Overture No. 2

Bryce Dessner

Violin Concerto [San Francisco Symphony Commission, U.S. Premiere]

Franz Schubert

Symphony No. 5

PEKKA KUUSISTO'S APPEARANCE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE SHENSON YOUNG ARTIST FUND.

SCHUBERT 5 & DESSNER VIOLIN CONCERTO

Conductor

Esa-Pekka Salonen is known as both a composer and conductor. He is currently the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, where he works alongside eight Collaborative Partners from a variety of disciplines, ranging from composers to roboticists. He is the Conductor Laureate for the Philharmonia Orchestra, where he was Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor from 2008 until 2021, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009, and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He is currently in the midst of Multiverse Esa-Pekka Salonen, a two-season residency as both composer and conductor, at Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. As a member of the faculty of LA's Colburn School, he develops, leads, and directs the pre-professional Negaunee Conducting Program. Salonen co-founded— and from 2003 until 2018 served as the Artistic Director for—the annual Baltic Sea Festival, which invites celebrated artists to promote unity and ecological awareness among the countries around the Baltic Sea.

Since joining the San Francisco Symphony in 2020, Salonen’s tenure has been defined by an impulse to embrace the possibilities of the orchestra and expand the institution beyond the confines of the subscription season. In addition to an unprecedented leadership model in which he is joined by eight Collaborative Partners—whose diversity of expertise reflects the scope of experience he envisions as the future of classical music and its audience—Salonen has led a series of collaborations across disciplines and practices which unite the Symphony’s musicians, administrative staff, and hands-on facility workers into a singular engine dedicated to engaging classical music in novel ways.

Salonen also brings his longstanding affinity for emerging technologies to the Symphony. In his first two seasons, he has spearheaded a complete overhaul of Davies Hall’s complement of audio and visual recording equipment, launched the SFSymphony+ streaming platform with a series of signature projects including an AI-infused take on the music of Györgi Ligeti, and the Grammy-nominated Throughline, and reshaped the Symphony into a powerhouse of the unexpected, equally comfortable with live performance and expansive new media projects.

Salonen has an extensive and varied recording career, both as a conductor and composer. His recent recordings include Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, recorded with Lise Davidsen and the Philharmonia Orchestra; Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin and Dance Suite, also with the Philharmonia; Stravinsky’s Persephone, featuring Andrew Staples, Pauline Cheviller, and the Finnish National Opera, and a 2018 box set of his complete Sony recordings. His compositions appear on releases from Sony, Deutsche Grammophon, and Decca; his Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman), Violin Concerto (with Leila Jofesowicz), and Cello Concerto (with Yo-Yo Ma) all appear on recordings conducted by Salonen himself.

Salonen is the recipient of many major awards, including the UNESCO Rostrum Prize for his work Floof in 1992, and the Siena Prize, given by the Accademia Chigiana, in 1993; he is the first conductor to receive it. In 1995 he received the Royal Philharmonic Society's Opera Award and two years later, its Conductor Award. Salonen was awarded the Litteris et Artibus medal, one of Sweden's highest honors, by the King of Sweden in 1996. In 1998 the French government awarded him the rank of Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In addition to receiving both the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland and the Helsinki Medal, he was named Commander, First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland by the President of Finland. Musical America named him its Musician of the Year in 2006, and he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. His Violin Concerto won the 2012 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. He was the recipient of the 2014 Nemmers Composition Prize, which included a residency at the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University and performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2020, he was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by the Queen of England. To date, he has received seven honorary doctorates in four different countries.