San Francisco Symphony
September 17, 1980, struck l’Amérique profonde as a day just like any other: Iraqi ground forces crossed the border into Iran and Walter Cronkite was cited as the country’s most trusted newscaster. So what was new?
In San Francisco, the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall was.
Four days earlier, September 13, a “hard hat concert” celebrated workmen and others who had contributed to the building’s construction since 1978. Three days later, a gala opening glittered across the country as the first national telecast of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) introduced the sleek newcomer on the cultural stage.
That was a week that was. At every performance, gentle and soft-spoken benefactor Louise M. Davies (whose $5 million gift had launched the funding of the $28 million Hall) appeared on stage to acknowledge tributes (“Ooh, a little symphony hall in diamonds, how sweet!”) and to explain her personal contribution: “Well, you see, I had it.”
On September 17, the baton of conductor Edo de Waart descended and the orchestra “hurled” at the audience (that verb is courtesy of the late teacher and critic Michael Steinberg) its Allegro impetuoso, the first notes of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, the “Symphony of a Thousand.”
This month, twenty-nine years later, San Francisco Symphony conductor and program director Michael Tilson Thomas—passionate (obsessed?) about Mahler since childhood and “a born Mahlerian,” says general manager John Kieser—brings the composer back to town for the Mahler Festival of symphonies and songs (September 16 through October 3; the two full symphonies will be Nos. 1 and 5; a full schedule can be found at nobhillgazette.com).
Another Mahler milestone for the orchestra and maestro Tilson Thomas is the just-released recording of No. 8 in E-flat Major, the final recording by SFS of Mahler’s symphonies, a project that began in 2001 (which will be concluded with other works before the centennial of the SFS in 2011–12).
Why Mahler? We inquired, and HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED.
Tilson Thomas on Mahler—Michael, age thirteen, was waiting for his parents at their friends’ home and was plumped down to listen to “some music”; Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde as it happened. “I divide my life between before I heard that recording,” he has said, “and after I heard it. I could not believe that [such music] existed. I never got over it.
“It’s really scary to play this music. You have to go out on a tremendous limb sometimes…right on the borderline of the most dangerous kind of playing: playing so high and so soft that the notes might break up and disappear, or…so powerfully for such a long period of time that your endurance can start to fail…you wonder how you can ever look people straight in the eyes ever again.”
John Kieser on Mahler—Asked why Steinberg said, “No orchestra in the world is better equipped to perform Mahler [than the SFS],” Kieser replies, “Tilson Thomas’s grasp of the legacy of performing new music. These are athletes—fast, precise; they can go the distance even with all that emotional content. They perform as Michael Phelps swims, with grace and flair. It’s a perfect storm.”
John Kieser on recording Mahler’s Eighth—“There are moments of overwhelming power; others so delicate and refined. We have 8 soloists, 260 choristers (the SFS Boys’ Choir, SF Girls’ Chorus), 110 instruments on the stage, 7 brass in the balcony, our 9,000-pipe Ruffatti organ [the only Mahler using an organ].”
Erin Wall (a soprano in the Eighth recording) on Teamwork—“There are eight soloists and everyone has a contribution to make; you are part of a team. If you think it’s all about you, you’ll be in big trouble. You have to find your place in it. The big temptation is to try to scream as loudly as you can, but if you try to fight the piece, you will lose.”
The Last Words—“Overwhelming,” says Wall; “Universe of sound,” notes recording producer Andreas Neubronner; “Epic—just big!” states Robert Ward, principal horn.
Georgia I. Hesse was the founding travel editor of the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, a job she enjoyed for many years. She is now freelancing.
