concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Apr. 18th, 2026 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSimone Young, from Australia, guest conducted. So was the living composer - from Australia, I mean. 35-year-old Ella Macens offered The Space Between the Stars, depicting what it's like to lie on the ground at night and contemplate the titular view. Unsurprisingly, the music offered sheens and broad melodies, often for strings, sometimes over quiet pulsations. Despite a few Ligeti-like chords, it was mostly so intensely consonant as to resemble movie music more than anything contemporarily classical.
Gautier Capuçon soloed in the Cello Concerto No. 1 of Camille Saint-Saëns, a brief work in one movement in ABA form, where the B section is a charming Tchaikovsky-like chipper waltz.
Lastly, about an hour of "bleeding chunks" as they're called, orchestral excerpts from Wagner's Ring, also including the Siegfried Idyll, which is not part of the Ring cycle although many apparently think it is. Apparently the titular opera doesn't have any bleeding chunks worth excerpting, although the other three in the cycle certainly do, so Young put this in instead. Wagner is much better as a tone-poem composer than he ever was writing operas, though his tendency to beat the listener over the head with his Leitmotivs remains irritating in any form.
Gautier Capuçon soloed in the Cello Concerto No. 1 of Camille Saint-Saëns, a brief work in one movement in ABA form, where the B section is a charming Tchaikovsky-like chipper waltz.
Lastly, about an hour of "bleeding chunks" as they're called, orchestral excerpts from Wagner's Ring, also including the Siegfried Idyll, which is not part of the Ring cycle although many apparently think it is. Apparently the titular opera doesn't have any bleeding chunks worth excerpting, although the other three in the cycle certainly do, so Young put this in instead. Wagner is much better as a tone-poem composer than he ever was writing operas, though his tendency to beat the listener over the head with his Leitmotivs remains irritating in any form.
