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  Salonen, Philharmonia Premiere Dreamers in SF

  March 20, 2019 | By Georgia Rowe, Musical America

  BERKELEY, CA--Anticipation couldn’t have been running much higher when Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, arrived in Berkeley last weekend. With three programs on the schedule, Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, the residency offered a deep dive into the conductor’s artistry.

  Results exceeded expectations. Salonen, who late last year was named to succeed Michael Tilson Thomas as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, led the British orchestra that he has directed since 2008 in bold and often revelatory performances.

  Presented by Cal Performances in Zellerbach Hall, the concert featured the world premiere of Dreamers, an oratorio by composer Jimmy López and librettist Nilo Cruz exploring the immigrant experience, and the first Bay Area performance of Salonen’s Cello Concerto, as well as works by Bartók, Bruckner, Schoenberg, Sibelius, and Stravinsky.

  The range was impressive, Salonen’s mastery of his orchestra complete. And what the performances said about the future of music in the Bay Area was nothing short of thrilling.

  Sunday afternoon's concert was the main event; with camera crews onstage live-streaming its performance, Dreamers, commissioned by this presenter, is a suitably large-scale work about one of the crucial issues of today. López is Peruvian-American composer whose credits include the opera Bel Canto, based on Ann Patchett’s best-selling novel; Cruz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban American poet-playwright and Bel Canto's librettist. Their score, cast in six movements, calls for orchestra, mixed chorus, and, in a departure from the standard oratorio form, a single vocal soloist, here represented by radiant Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez.

  Cruz’s poetic libretto draws from interviews with many “dreamers,” immigrants brought to the U.S. as children whose legal status remains in limbo. Yet the opening movement, titled “The First and Distant Past,” evokes an ancient time: “Before everything and nothing, there was the will, the will to migrate.”

  Subsequent movements, titled “Borders and Boundaries,” “Children,” “A Dreamer Who Studied Linguistics,” and “Sueños,” are more current, and more harrowing, depicting the terror and uncertainty of today’s migrant lives. The final movement, “After,” offers a hopeful coda: “No one can stop…the road from taking the form of freedom.”

  López’s bracing score uses a fairly limited orchestral palette, and the movements, which move from slow, shimmering introductions to pulsing minimalist string episodes and chaotic outbursts, often feel repetitive. Still, the work makes its points. It’s not always pretty, but Dreamers doesn’t mean to be. It is a Cri de Coeur, an impassioned warning for our time.

  Salonen presided over his forces with customary verve; the choruses—Volti, led by Robert Geary, and the U.C. Berkeley Chamber Chorus, under Dr. Wei Cheng— sang powerfully. Martínez was brilliant, sailing through the vocal line’s often stratospheric leaps and delivering each episode with urgency.

  That sense of urgency continued after intermission as Salonen tore into The Firebird with fierce, concentrated energy, delivering the terrifying force, as well as the ineffable beauty, of Stravinsky’s score. He brought the audience back to earth with an encore of Ravel’s The Enchanted Garden, its peaceful reverie registering anew after the afternoon’s tumult.

  The Salonen weekend began Friday with Sibelius’s tone poem, The Oceanides. The conductor elicited the sound of the sea from calm—woodwinds eddying, bells chiming—to a fervent crescendo.

  Friday’s centerpiece was the conductor's own Cello Concerto, with Truls Mørk as soloist (as performed last week in New York). Composed in 2016 for Yo-Yo Ma, who gave its premiere in Chicago in 2017, it’s a blast: inspired by cosmology, nature, and artificial intelligence, the score’s opening phrases, as Salonen noted in his prefatory remarks, evoke a kind of “stylized chaos.” Indeed, the sparkly music of the first movement suggested an otherworldly scene, reinforced when the soloist entered to sing a long, ethereal song. Electronica is part of the second movement landscape, where the cello plays a questing theme, slow and meditative, that yields to aggressive, slicing lines. The effect is mesmerizing: a world slowly coming to life. The finale incorporates bongos and congas as the soloist accelerates into a whirling dance surrounded by big, stormy swaths of sound; in the end, the cello ascends to a high B-flat and the maelstrom yields to moments of hushed beauty. Salonen conducted with precision, and Mørk was astonishing, meeting the work’s technical demands with absolute assurance.

  The evening ended with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Here, Salonen drew incisive contributions from each section. Guiding the ensemble through the work’s abrupt swerves and outbursts, his conducting was alert, cogent, and often surprisingly brisk; I’d never heard the propulsive finale taken at such a breakneck pace. The encore, Sibelius’ Valse triste, offered a richly luxuriant performance.

  Saturday’s concert paired Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht with Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. The former, which can sound shapeless in lesser hands, simply throbbed with vigor; Salonen elicited its strains of sweetness and turbulence in a muscular reading, with fine solo work from concertmaster Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay and principal violist Yukiko Ogura. The orchestra’s brass took top honors in Bruckner’s monumental symphony; throughout the hour-long performance, the work’s folk-inspired themes came to the fore with uncommon vitality.

  Pictured:  Ana María Martínez

  _{Photo by Tom Specht}