Salonon: the penultimate program

The San Francisco Symphony program this week was a miscellaneous assortment of four pieces, each about 20 minutes long. Perhaps that's why, even though it was music director Esa-Pekka Salonen's next-to-last program, the hall was not as packed on Saturday as it was last week. (I don't usually go to SFS on Saturday. I did this week because I was doing something else on Friday. More on that later.) The audience cheered EPS just as lustily, though, despite his attempts to modestly back off at the end.

We had:

1. Richard Strauss's two shortest - and, not coincidentally, best - tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel. These were played with quicksilver energy and bumptious color, so much so that, had I not known better and were told that Don Juan actually portrayed the merry prankster Till, I might have believed it. (The reverse would be less plausible.)
2. Sibelius's shortest and most cryptic symphony, the Seventh. This was played in the same manner: it was so brilliantly colorful and convincing moment-by-moment that it didn't matter where the piece was going, and indeed I wasn't sure if it was going anywhere. Each section seemed to come from a different work; there was even a moment straight out of Valse Triste.
3. A premiere, Rewilding by local composer Gabriella Smith. This celebrates the titular ecosystem restoration projects by means of musical onomatopoeia. It both begins and ends with the percussion evoking the squeaking of Smith's bicycle as she rides to and from her project sites (which is what she spends her non-musical time doing). In between are attempts at animal sounds: lots of insect swarms from the strings and bird calls of various kinds from the woodwinds, while the brass play what come across more as Ingram Marshall-style foghorns.

EPS had a definite vision for this concert, and this is an orchestra that can do anything that a good conductor asks of it.