ESA-PEKKA SALONEN & YEFIM BRONFMAN

June 21, 22 & 23, 2024

Overview

By the time his Fourth Symphony premiered, Anton Bruckner was 57 years old, a Viennese organist underdog, the target of hisses and boos. The “Romantic” was his first major composition to earn real applause. Composed over four turbulent years, Robert Schumann’s only piano concerto features a lustrous intermezzo, blazing bravura passages, and encoded tributes to the composer’s wife, muse, and finest interpreter. Romantic, no?

These concerts are presented in honor of our San Francisco Symphony Life Governors. We are deeply grateful for their incredible years of service.

These concerts are presented in honor of Ruth Evelyn Miller, who generously provided for the San Francisco Symphony through her estate.

At A Glance

What makes a great piano concerto? In 1893 Robert Schumann wrote: “We must await the genius who will show us in a newer and more brilliant way how orchestra and piano may be combined, how the soloist, dominant at the keyboard, may unfold the wealth of his instrument and his art, while the orchestra, no longer a mere spectator, may interweave its manifold facets into the scene.” That much-awaited genius would end up being Schumann himself. In1841, he composed a one-movement Concert Phantasie, and four years later went back and revised it into the first movement of his Piano Concerto.

Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is the only one of his nine to which he gave a subtitle. The Romantic Symphony evokes German Romanticism in its allusions to the hunt and in its brilliant spotlighting of the instruments most associated with that pursuit, the horns. Quite a few years after he composed his Fourth Symphony, Bruckner penned a scenario for this symphony. He described the first movement as a “medieval city—dawn”; the second as a “rustic love-scene,” in which a “peasant boy woos his sweetheart, but she scorns him”; the third as “The Hunting of the Hare,” and a “Dance Melody During the Huntsmen’s Meal”; and the fourth as a “Folk Festival.”

Artists

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Conductor

Yefim Bronfman

Piano

San Francisco Symphony

Program

Robert Schumann

Piano Concerto

Anton Bruckner

Symphony No. 4, Romantic

DIGITAL PROGRAM BOOK

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN & YEFIM BRONFMAN

Enrich Your Experience

Friday, June 21 from 6:30–7:00pm: A preconcert talk with SF Symphony musicians Katie Kadarauch and Jessie Fellows, moderated by Chief Artistic Officer Phillippa Cole, will be presented from the stage. Free to all ticketholders.