SFS world premiere of Gabriella Smith’s Rewilding delves into primal sounds

United StatesUnited States R. Strauss, Sibelius, Smith: San Francisco Symphony / Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor). Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 6.6.2025. (HS)

Composer Gabriella Smith, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony © Stefan Cohen

R. Strauss – Don Juan; Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry PranksX
Sibelius – Symphony No.7 in C major
XGabriella Smith – Rewilding (world premiere)

Gabriella Smith has joined the ranks of today’s leading composers, and the San Francisco Symphony has performed several of her works in recent years. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and often came across the bay for concerts, so there was an extra level of pride when her latest composition, the first commissioned by the SFS, had its world premiere in Davies Symphony Hall.

Smith’s signature style creates unique sounds that freely use extended techniques and everyday materials for percussion. It all piles up within the orchestra in sounds that can tell a story. This fit smoothly into the SFS program, which surrounded her 23-minute Rewilding with two tone poems by Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius’s shortest symphony – familiar pieces, all in a single movement and each about twenty minutes. Every work fashioned a world of its own.

In Rewilding, Smith was inspired by her interest in climate change and a lifelong passion for hiking, backpacking, bicycling and working in the outdoors on projects to address the damage that our planet has suffered in recent decades due to the climate crisis. This piece embraces sounds she experienced on a specific recent project, the restoration of an abandoned airplane runway in Seattle. Among them were the whir of actual bicycle wheels, songs of specific birds and a chorus of frogs conjured by violin sounds.

At its base, though, Rewilding resists a foundation of melodies, harmonies or consistent rhythms that Richard Strauss or Sibelius might recognize as storytelling tools. It is built around sustained unisons with rustlings and flutterings that add extra complexities. Dynamics swell and ebb until, in the last few minutes, actual harmonies create a sort of hymn. At that moment, there is a sense of things coming together to be what they should be, at least for a minute or two before the return to a gentle type of chaos.

As in other works of hers that this orchestra has performed in recent years –  specifically, the tone poem Tumblebird Contrails (which was also played at the 2023 Nobel Prize concert in Oslo) and the organ concerto Breathing Forests – the sounds of nature are the point. If Rewilding never quite reached the grandeur of those earlier compositions, it still offered a feast of sonic variety and the fascination of hearing nature’s music filtered through a modern symphony orchestra.

SFS percussion presents an intermezzo of unusual sounds in Rewilding © Stefan Cohen

Bookending the piece, the four-person percussion section faded in at the beginning and faded out at the end with bicycle wheels turning and other metallic rattling. Midway through, the entire section spent several minutes in a sort of intermezzo – breaking twigs, swishing brushes and piping squeaks – a group cadenza that had the audience giggling.

Much, though, was built around sustained, often rotund sounds from the brass, whistles from the woodwinds and various string sounds bowed, plucked and otherwise created with extended techniques. It all coalesces into actual chords when the whole orchestra finally focuses on what we might recognize as traditional music, but only for a moment. Then it reverts to the random nature sounds. It felt unsettling but, then again, that may be what the composer was after.

Just before the finish, it all faded to something very close to silence. Out of this quiet rustling, a sort of brass chorale emerges that ends on a sustained unison, underlain by a swirl of woodwinds and, finally, the return of whirring bicycle. Rewilding got the most enthusiastic audience reaction of the evening.

The other piece I was especially interested in hearing was Sibelius’s Symphony No.7. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen programmed it in this, the third of his final four programs in his tenure as the orchestra’s music director. It was a fascinating choice to pair with Rewilding. Neither tells a story, per se – they actually explore aspects of purely musical means. Where Rewilding aims to create a natural setting, the Sibelius compresses the building blocks of music – especially tempo and rhythm but also melody, harmony and dynamics – into a magical flow.

In his tenure here, Salonen has shown an affinity for music by fellow Finns, including Sibelius. His overall assurance in the music and command of tempo paid big dividends in this vital performance. He managed to squeeze in extra dimensions to the ever-shifting harmonies without missing any of the subtle transitions to tempos that seemed to evolve seamlessly into unexpected new speeds. The brass covered themselves in glory, emerging from an almost-imperceptible entrance to reach glorious climaxes, especially in the last pages of the score. Timpanist Edward Stephan (the only percussionist in the orchestration) punctuated effectively, and the interplay among the low strings and low woodwinds created some gorgeous reverberations.

Two Strauss tone poems bracketed the program. It opened with a swashbuckling Don Juan in which the orchestra nailed the tricky opening flourish as Salonen established a rapid clip and maintained the intensity right through the finish. Even better was Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks which switched from scene to scene with alacrity.

A clue as to how Eulenspiegel, with its highly specific storyline, fits with Rewilding might be this thought from Michael Steinberg’s archival program note: ‘As always, he could not make up his mind whether he was engaged in tone painting or just music’. Although descriptions of the piece have outlined specific scenes, the program noted this quote from the composer: ‘I really cannot provide a program for Eulenspiegel … it seems enough to point out the two motifs [Strauss jots down the opening of the work and the virtuosic horn theme] which, in the most diverse disguises, moods and situations, pervade the whole’.

Although Smith generously lays out the inspirations for Rewilding, both composers wrote music that travels through ‘disguises, moods and situations’ without actually detailing a story. Rewilding, in the end, may be closer to Sibelius’s pure music than either of the tone poems.

Harvey Steiman

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