SAN FRANCISCO — It was a bittersweet evening in the City by the Bay on June 14. Esa-Pekka Salonen, a huge, unexpected catch for the San Francisco Symphony in 2020, was leading the final performance of his shockingly abbreviated term as the orchestra’s music director in Davies Symphony Hall.
Earlier that day, a protest march and rally against the Trump administration’s policies gathered at the Civic Center Plaza. Though unrelated to American politics, there was a degree of protest at the musical event, too. “Don’t go!” someone shouted in the hall just before Salonen delivered the downbeat.
That person might have been speaking for almost everyone in the building.
In his five seasons with the SFS — actually only four, since his official live debut had been delayed a year due to the Covid shutdown of concert life — Salonen had maintained the high level of playing established by his predecessor, Michael Tilson Thomas, and had even pushed it further. He brought his own brand of bold, new programming to the orchestra, added a diverse array of “collaborative partners” to his team, and hoped to strike an alliance with the tech bros of Silicon Valley to create new vistas of what a symphony orchestra could be in the 21st century.
But the SFS board recently went into reverse mode, citing “budget deficits,” making cutbacks in funding of tours, commissions, recordings, and progressive programming — and Salonen decided that San Francisco was no longer the place for someone like him. In March 2024, he announced that he would not renew his contract with the SFS in unusually blunt terms: “I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, because I do not share the same goals for the institution as the Board of Governors does.” Protests from the musicians and members of the audience immediately followed, but both sides stood firm.
As if to prove that there are no hard feelings, the special edition of the program book contains a laudatory timeline of the Salonen years, a diplomatic sendoff essay from board chair Priscilla B. Geeslin, and several loving testimonials from SFS musicians extolling Salonen’s musicianship and deliciously dry sense of humor. He was even introduced over the P.A. at his final concert as “Sir Esa-Pekka Salonen” (he is actually just a KBE, an honorary knighthood). But Salonen’s name is conspicuously absent from the list of 23 guest conductors who will lead the SFS in the 2025-26 season.
The obvious choice for a parting statement would be to go out with a bang — and so Salonen did, leading an explosive performance of Mahler’s mighty Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection), a piece with all the bells and whistles an event like this could want, plus close associations with the orchestra’s history. The pacing was often lightning fast, particularly in the first movement with its whiplash unison opening lines in the cellos and basses, the singsong pace of the Andante moderato second movement, and the rush through the scherzo-like third movement.
There were also moments of repose where Salonen could exercise more expressive, fluctuating freedom than we usually get from him, and the second movement’s exaggerated pauses suggested that the conductor’s sense of humor was operating, perhaps mockingly. If timings of SFS recordings of Mahler 2 are a rough guide, Salonen’s performance was closer to that of MTT’s predecessor at the SFS, Herbert Blomstedt, than MTT’s generally broader conception.
The sheer intensity of the apocalyptic moments of strife in the climaxes, with the SFS musicians playing as if they were demonically possessed, seemed to suggest the storms the orchestra is facing now and in the coming months. But Salonen left room for hope that in the near future, the resurrection of the orchestra someday, as per the shouts of triumph at the close, is still possible. That might be a fanciful interpretation on my part, but it fits.
For the “Urlicht” movement, Salonen had the best there is among American Mahler singers, Sasha Cooke, whose warm, slightly tremulous mezzo-soprano served up the goods as eloquently as expected. While soprano Heidi Stober’s pitch was sometimes approximate, she delivered her part passionately. Taking a stately tempo in the end, Salonen gave the wide-screen coda — now infiltrating pop culture due to the striking concert sequence in the film Maestro — all the splendor and glory he could muster, with the SFS Chorus fervently singing out.
As the deafening applause inevitably broke out, principal librarian Margo Kieser handed Salonen a glass of beer, a traditional Salonen aprés-concert refresher. The audience wouldn’t let him go, cheering for approximately 15 minutes, stamping their feet in unison at one point. He returned from the wings for eight more curtain calls (nine in all, counting the initial ovation). After his last curtain call, the blushing 66-year-old Finn (he turns 67 at the end of June) finally addressed his audience from the podium, and the words stung. “This is a great orchestra,” he said. “You don’t know what you have in this city … So take good care of them.”
