Have you ever heard the sound of a country music fiddler tearing out of a burning barn at top speed, with his bowing arm going like crazy the entire time?
I hadn’t either, until the San Francisco Symphony gave the U.S. premiere of Bryce Dessner’s Violin Concerto in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Oct. 21.
That opened up my ears in a big hurry.
“Hurry” is the operative word here, because Dessner’s exciting 25-minute work bolts out of the starting gate at a gallop and never looks back. There’s some slow, reflective music in there as well (we’ll come back to that in a moment), but the predominant impression the piece leaves is of a breathless, kinetic frenzy.
Thursday’s premiere, with Esa-Pekka Salonen presiding suavely at the podium, marked a twofold introduction for the group of Collaborative Partners that the music director has invited to help him forge new ideas for the orchestra’s future. Dessner, guitarist and founding member of the rock band the National, is one of this group of eight, and Pekka Kuusisto, the fiendishly smart and virtuosic violinist who took on the demanding soloist’s role, is another.
If Dessner’s new composition, a Symphony co-commission, stands as an emblem of what’s coming down the pike, then perhaps its most striking aspect is the way it threads a path between disruption and tradition. The music of this concerto bristles with new and evocative sounds, especially in the composer’s spangly, percussion-laden writing for orchestra.
At the same time — and Dessner’s pre-performance remarks from the stage made it clear that this was entirely deliberate — it’s a work that situates itself conspicuously in the long tradition of violin concertos going back as far as Bach. It’s in three movements of the usual shape and dimension (even if the lack of movement breaks tends to obscure the landscape), and it creates a relationship between soloist and orchestra that is partly cooperative and partly competitive.
Even more compelling is the way Dessner grafts the gestural language of folk fiddling — motoric rhythms across all four strings of the instrument, sharp bowing attacks and pointed melodic figures — onto the history of violin concert showmanship, including a splashy solo cadenza at the end of the first movement. If Niccolò Paganini were to preside at a barn dance, one feels this is what it might sound like. (The fiddling in this case is Finnish rather than American in flavor, but the point still stands.)
Through the unbroken barrage of sound that dominates the first movement — the soloist is granted perhaps 30 seconds of rest altogether over 15 minutes — melodic ideas pop through, like silver threads glinting out of a massive tapestry. Dessner then pursues these thoughts into a tender slow movement centered on a sweet-toned string chorale, before the piece explodes once more into a finale of vast tidal swells and falls.
This is a concerto that requires stamina, imagination and insight from the soloist, and Kuusisto’s performance — tireless and expressive without being too bluntly athletic — was a marvel. As a beautiful encore, he played a gentle Finnish folk dance in memory of the great Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink, who had died that day at 92.
The remainder of the program was far more traditional, even timid, in nature. A robust and nicely dramatic account of Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 2 opened the program — perhaps a nod to the composer’s “Fidelio,” for which this piece was one of a series of discarded overtures and which is on the boards across Grove Street at the War Memorial Opera House for a production by the San Francisco Opera.
After intermission, though, Salonen and the orchestra offered a weirdly genteel and bloodless account of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, all lace doilies and tiresome good manners. After the eruptive fervor of Dessner’s concerto, this landed as a limply ineffectual conclusion.
San Francisco Symphony: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Oct. 22-23. $20-$165. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org