Music, like dreams, can have its own narrative logic, one that unfolds compellingly without necessarily making concrete sense. That surrealism takes beautiful shape in “Sleep & Unremembrance,” an elusive and wondrous tone poem by the young American composer Elizabeth Ogonek that had its first San Francisco Symphony performance on Thursday, March 10.
Stravinsky was ostensibly the program’s headliner, because Stravinsky’s music — in this case the Violin Concerto, with soloist Leila Josefowicz, and “The Rite of Spring” — is a known quantity. And Symphony audiences are eager to hear what Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen does with repertoire that has been an acknowledged specialty for his predecessor, Michael Tilson Thomas.
But the real magic in Thursday’s matinee performance in Davies Symphony Hall came from Ogonek’s 12-minute piece, which opened the concert in a vein of sumptuous, muted introspection.
Ogonek, who recently did a stint as composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony, takes her inspiration from a late poem by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska titled “While Sleeping.” (Ogonek helpfully read it aloud in advance of the performance.) It’s a compressed masterpiece of reflection that recasts the trope of life passing before one’s eyes in the form of a brief dream.
In response, Ogonek spins a mystical landscape of salient melodic and textural fragments — fog banks of muted brass, an urgent little piccolo tune, a languorous waltz. Each of these appears for only a moment or two, but each one imprints itself on the audience’s memory before vanishing.
The effect is entirely analogous to the familiar dream emotion that Szymborska’s poem also conjures up — the one that goes, “I’d never seen this place (or object, or person) before, but I knew immediately that it held some central significance to my life.”
Szymborska’s narrator awakes at the end of her dream. Ogonek’s does too, in the form of a rapturous viola solo that somehow imparts understanding and comfort and an acknowledgment of life’s mysteries — all within the space of a few measures. It’s a knockout.
Among the splendors of “Sleep & Unremembrance,” which was written in 2016 for the London Symphony Orchestra, is Ogonek’s light-footed mastery of the orchestra. Woodwinds and strings balance one another in a variety of colorful combinations that are never overtly showy but always piquant. Under Salonen’s deft leadership, the orchestra delivered these instrumental watercolors with perfect care, creating a world that was both solid and evanescent.
Stravinsky’s sonic palette — typically all hard edges and diamond-like precision — might have seemed an obvious contrast. Yet Salonen, for reasons I never really understood, decided to adopt a more soft-toned and ingratiating approach to both works.
He and Josefowicz turned the Violin Concerto into a joyous romp, full of leaps and exuberance. It was a rare chance to hear Stravinsky in a sunny vein, and one could only marvel at Josefowicz’s technical prowess and expressive depth. But I missed the tone of imperious steeliness that is generally the composer’s thumbprint.
The “Rite,” which occupied the concert’s second half, simply sounded shaggy and out of focus. The snaky woodwind figures of the opening (once past Stephen Paulson’s splendidly mournful bassoon solo) were too blurry to make their full impact; the big full-orchestra passages made a glorious noise without quite hitting their marks rhythmically.
Timpanist Edward Stephan, with an assist from principal percussionist Jacob Nissly, brought commanding directness to the proceedings, while the rest of the orchestra scrambled to keep up.
San Francisco Symphony:7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, March 11-12. $35-$125. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000.www.sfsymphony.org