Bay Area crowd sold on Salonen

Surely, San Francisco-centricity has not completely gone the way of the dot-com boom? This civilized, if smug, arts mecca must still harbor some snobs who, when they peer south toward Los Angeles, look down their noses.

But if so, they weren’t to be found at Davies Concert Hall on Saturday night for Esa-Pekka Salonen’s San Francisco Symphony debut. Instead, the audience responded with a startling four standing ovations. The first followed the West Coast premiere of Salonen’s latest orchestral work, “Insomnia”; another rewarded pianist Yefim Bronfman and Salonen for blazing through Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto; the third acknowledged Bronfman’s wildly pounded encore of the last movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata; and the fourth came after Salonen ended the program with the suite from Bartok’s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin.”

Audiences here do get excited. But a San Francisco Symphony-savvy friend assured me that they don’t ordinarily get this excited. Actually, it’s unheard of, she said.

Salonen appears, in fact, to have accomplished a breakthrough in north/south symphonic relations. While for years the Los Angeles Philharmonic regularly invited San Francisco Symphony music directors to guest conduct, the northerners seldom reciprocated. Their current music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, may be a native Angeleno, but it didn’t hurt that he had been estranged from the L.A. Phil when he was hired a decade ago.

Now, it’s a new California. In December, Tilson Thomas returned to his hometown orchestra after an 18-year absence to lead a profound interpretation of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. And last week Salonen, who led a loud, hyperactive program with something approaching manic energy, took San Francisco by storm. When it was all over, the orchestra looked drained.

The audience, I suspect, came psyched for the third and final performance of Salonen’s program. Joshua Kosman’s review in the morning’s San Francisco Chronicle had said that Salonen conducting “Insomnia” was enough to make the program “one the most exciting concerts Davies Symphony Hall has witnessed this season.”

Salonen’s new score is indeed newsworthy. Written in the aftermath of 9/11 and first performed in Tokyo at the end of 2002, it is more darkly tinted than his typically bright orchestral music. The unusual incorporation of four Wagner tubas gives the overall sound a dusky mass. In a program note, the composer writes that, in a nocturnal mood, he found himself drawn to the night’s “demonic” aspects, “the kind of persistent, compulsive thoughts that run through our mind when lying hopelessly awake in the early hours.”

“Insomnia” opens with an almost lulling, Stravinskyan-sounding chorale in the winds. Agitation creeps in, the music becoming heavy and machinelike, then breaking off into frenzied fiddling from a solo violin. This process becomes a cycle, more exaggerated with each variation, culminating in what is practically a wall of sound as dawn breaks.

But what is truly extraordinary about the 22-minute score is the way it grips attention. Insomnia is not, for most people, a pleasurable sensation. Here, though, it is, as Salonen, through an exceptional command of a large orchestra, explores the more distant and sometimes ecstatic reaches of the involuntarily alert mind. “Insomnia” will reach L.A. next season on Feb. 24 and 25. Mark your calendars.

Salonen surrounded “Insomnia” with hysteria of one sort or another. He began with a white-hot account of Mussorgsky’s haunted-house “A Night on Bald Mountain” and concluded by vividly animating “The Miraculous Mandarin,” a nasty confrontation between a prostitute, a thug and a ghoul. For Prokofiev’s youthful First Piano Concerto, he good-naturedly let Bronfman go to town, which meant that speed limits were broken. The orchestra maintained its hellbent pursuit of the pianist but not without breaking into a sweat. The crowd went wild. Salonen is writing a piano concerto for Bronfman. Look out!

Under Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony has become a fine and flexible orchestra, even a soulful one. But it clearly is not used to being pushed quite as hard as this. To their collective credit, the players kept up. Too often, however, their sound lacked depth, and it sometimes became strident.

Salonen clearly made a big, big-city impression on Bay Area audiences, and they will no doubt clamor for more. The shellshocked symphony may not be in such a hurry.