OPEN REHEARSAL: MUST THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD TUNES?

June 23, 2022

Overview

Esa-Pekka Salonen, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, and the SF Symphony present John Adams’ Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, a rollicking work evoking Franz Liszt and the gritty sounds of American funk music in equal measure. Steven Stucky’s Radical Light, inspired by the grandeur of Jean Sibelius’ symphonies, opens the concert and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 closes it with rich orchestral textures, bold brass proclamations, and a final movement inspired by serene scenes of Nordic swans.

Due to complications brought about by COVID-19 we have temporarily suspended coffee and free donut service at our Open Rehearsals.

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

At A Glance

Steven Stucky was one of the preeminent American composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He wrote Radical Light for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, intending it as companion to symphonies by Jean Sibelius. The title comes from a poem by A.R. Ammons: “He held radical light / as music in his skull: music / turned, as / over ridges immanences of evening light rise. . .”

John Adams’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? is a piano concerto inspired by a line in an old New Yorker article about the radical Catholic social justice activist Dorothy Day (echoing a quote attributed to various sources). The first movement’s theme derives from a 1950s TV show tune, while the second tries to weave a longer, enduring melody from wisp-like fragments. The finale is reminiscent of a tarantella, the south Italian dance inspired by a tarantula bite.

Jean Sibelius must have still been feeling the glow of his recent successful visit to America when on his return home, he heard the news of the assassination at Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne. He had scarcely settled into his life again when, to his horror and disbelief, virtually all Europe was at war. Sibelius had jotted these words in his notebook: “In a deep valley again. But I already begin to see dimly the mountain that I shall certainly ascend..... God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.”

From notes by Thomas May and Michael Steinberg

Artists

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Conductor

Víkingur Ólafsson

Piano

San Francisco Symphony

Program

Steven Stucky

Radical Light [San Francisco Symphony Premiere]

John Adams

Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? [San Francisco Symphony Premiere]

Jean Sibelius

Symphony No. 5

THESE CONCERTS, A PART OF THE BARBRO AND BERNARD OSHER MASTERWORKS SERIES, ARE MADE POSSIBLE BY A GENEROUS GIFT FROM BARBRO AND BERNARD OSHER.

VÍKINGUR ÓLAFSSON'S APPEARANCE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE SHENSON YOUNG ARTIST FUND.

THESE CONCERTS ARE GENEROUSLY SPONSORED BY THE MR. AND MRS. GEORGE OTTO SIBELIUS FUND.

THIS PROJECT IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

OPEN REHEARSALS ARE ENDOWED BY A BEQUEST FROM THE ESTATE OF KATHARINE HANRAHAN.

OPEN REHEARSAL: MUST THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD TUNES?

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.