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concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Oct. 25th, 2025 08:33 amDavid Afkham, a German conductor new to SFS, led two wildly unalike Russian works, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (with Sergey Khachatryan) and Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. Amazing that only 65 years separate them.
Actually they do have one thing in common: when they were new, people who disliked them derided them as vulgar. But there was nothing vulgar about Friday's performances. Though there's plenty of vigor in the Tchaikovsky concerto, the overall mien of the piece was soft and gentle, perhaps taking a cue from the soloist, who leaned so far in that direction that the high notes in his cadenza disappeared off the edge of audibility. (And his encore was a soft and gentle Armenian lament that went on for quite a while.)
Afkham did something similar with the Shostakovich, at least in the slower, first and fourth movements. The stark tragedy of these parts in other performances vanished entirely, and it was ... soft and gentle. This didn't stop the more vicious parts of the first movement from being firm enough, or the two scherzi from being fairly caustic. The finale leaned towards the cheerful, but gave full value to the enigmatic ending, where - as with the Fourth but none of the intervening works - Shostakovich refuses to supply an upbeat conclusion.
The result of this combination of fast parts played in a usual manner and slow parts purged of the strongly emotional was an Eighth that felt entirely different from any performance of the work I'd heard before. Weirdly revelatory.
Actually they do have one thing in common: when they were new, people who disliked them derided them as vulgar. But there was nothing vulgar about Friday's performances. Though there's plenty of vigor in the Tchaikovsky concerto, the overall mien of the piece was soft and gentle, perhaps taking a cue from the soloist, who leaned so far in that direction that the high notes in his cadenza disappeared off the edge of audibility. (And his encore was a soft and gentle Armenian lament that went on for quite a while.)
Afkham did something similar with the Shostakovich, at least in the slower, first and fourth movements. The stark tragedy of these parts in other performances vanished entirely, and it was ... soft and gentle. This didn't stop the more vicious parts of the first movement from being firm enough, or the two scherzi from being fairly caustic. The finale leaned towards the cheerful, but gave full value to the enigmatic ending, where - as with the Fourth but none of the intervening works - Shostakovich refuses to supply an upbeat conclusion.
The result of this combination of fast parts played in a usual manner and slow parts purged of the strongly emotional was an Eighth that felt entirely different from any performance of the work I'd heard before. Weirdly revelatory.
