concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The 90F+ heat wave of earlier this week has receded, but it was still plenty hot enough at home. But when I got up to the City, it was cold and foggy. Oh, nice! Traditional San Francisco summer weather, by the way.

EPS conducted. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the young cellist who made a hit playing at Meghan and Harry's wedding, performed Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto. This is a tough work to judge a cellist by, being angular and crabbed in the usual Shostakovich mode, but it do-+++++ have its dazzling-performer moments, like a long lyric passage entirely in harmonics. [Inserted comment by Tybalt, rolling around on my desk.]

EPS told the audience the well-worn story of the time in 1936 that Stalin went to see Shostakovich's opera, and a few days later a review appeared in Pravda titled "Muddle Instead of Music" and concluding with blood-chilling finality, "This is a game that could end very badly." No wonder Shostakovich was terrified for the rest of his life. EPS says he reminds his students of this when they're upset about bad reviews. "There are good reviews, there are bad reviews, and then there's this. So chill out."

Also on the program, Fairytale Poem by Sofia Gubaidulina, a short piece written, like Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, for children's radio, and almost as delightful. Has the eerie Gubaidulina flavor while being charming and lively and colorful. And Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini, a tone poem which the composer dismissed as "cold, false, and weak," and which the program note describes as "buffet[ing] us violently about." The performers did their best to make it sound convincing.

I tried an experiment on my way in. Usually going up to the City for a Symphony concert, I have dinner at Tadich Grill, an old-line seafood restaurant claiming to date back to Gold Rush days. But recently the Chronicle published an article slamming Tadich for lousy food and surly service - neither of which I've ever had there - and pushing a similar vintage seafood place called Sam's instead. So I tried Sam's. And the food wasn't bad, but not a patch on Tadich. The petrale sole fillet was smaller than Tadich's, it was breaded in some egg coating that didn't work well, and it was insufficiently deboned, yccch. The clam chowder had a nice broth, but was quite deficient in the clam department, again unlike Tadich's. Nope, I'm going back to my old reliable in the future.