Review: Esa-Pekka Salonen's next-to-last S.F. Symphony concerts promise renewal

San Francisco Chronicle​

07-06-2025

Composer Gabriella Smith knows how to make a lasting impression. Her organ concerto ' Breathing Forests ' was a highlight of the San Francisco Symphony's 2023-24 season, a work of tremendous power and originality.
Smith is back with a Symphony commission called 'Rewilding,' a paean to birds, insects and the process of returning the Earth to its natural state by undoing human damage and disruption. The 33-year-old Berkeley native has been dedicated to environmental concerns since her high school days, and these issues are major sources of inspiration for her music.
'Rewilding' had its world premiere on Friday, June 6, at Davies Symphony Hall on a program conducted by outgoing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The audience's enthusiasm for Salonen overmatched the poignancy of his impending departure.
Before the performance, Smith talked about her work in ecological restoration, most recently on a project to rewild a former military runway in Seattle. She cited the failure of current politicians to address the climate crisis but ended on a message of hope. 'There are people all around (you) who are taking action,' she said
Like 'Breathing Forests,' 'Rewilding' is a work of startling inventiveness, a cascade of astonishing sounds unfolding over about 25 minutes. Smith's music has an immense sonic palette, owing not only to her expressive skill with orchestration but also her penchant for unusual instrumentation. Bicycle frames, unshelled walnuts, metal mixing bowls, water bottles, twigs and branches are some of the everyday objects put to musical use.
In Smith's orchestra, you can't always tell where a particular sound is coming from. Strings slither from one note to the next while the winds bend their pitches, clouding the texture for the sake of achieving a particular color.
'Rewilding' may incorporate certain minimalist techniques — and the score introduces an element of chance by instructing the strings to play out of sync with each other — but the music's scope and riotous colors are anything but minimal or random, even if the structure isn't always clear.
The orchestra hummed, buzzed and yipped with the imagined sounds of insects, birds and maybe even canines. Popping noises arose, frogs ribbitted, a chorus of woodpeckers went wild. The sonorities pass from one group of instruments to another, thickening, bubbling, thinning out. 'Rewilding' builds, fades, builds again. A high-pitched section gives way to the lower strings and then to massed brass. After the last fade-out, you hear only bicycle wheels turning.
Listeners curious about where Smith will go next can get another peek into her imagination next April, when she's scheduled to curate a pair of SoundBox concerts for the Symphony.
Salonen opened the evening with a swift, sometimes very loud account of Richard Strauss' early tone poem 'Don Juan' — the same titular libertine who inspired Mozart's 'Don Giovanni.' In under 20 minutes, Strauss' vivid scene-setting does nearly as much with the character as that three-hour opera does.
The performance was a blazing display of the orchestra's virtuosity, starting with the sleekly lustrous strings and trumpets. Highlights included principal oboe Eugene Izotov's lyrical solo and his interplay with principal clarinet Carey Bell and principal bassoon Joshua Elmore.
And then there was the brilliant horn section, led by guest Daniel Hawkins, a former member of the orchestra and now principal horn of the Dallas Symphony. Hawkins and company took charge in 'Don Juan' and in the program's concluding selection, 'Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks,' also by Strauss. If you've ever wondered whether music can be sarcastic, this is the place to look for it. Salonen's interpretation had all the wit and cheek required. Alexander Barantschik nimbly dispatched the brief violin solo, and Matthew Griffith shone on E-flat clarinet.
The evening also included Jean Sibelius ' mysterious Symphony No. 7, the Finnish composer's final completed work in that form. (Sibelius is believed to have labored for some years over an Eighth Symphony, burning whatever existed of the score sometime in the 1940s.) Brooding, monumental and yet compact — consisting of only a single 20-minute movement — the Seventh, like other Sibelius works, implies a vast physical and spiritual landscape. Salonen led the music with solemn grandeur, shaping it firmly.