SF Chronicle

AN URGENT MUSICAL ARGUMENT

“Through an absorbing, wide-ranging and emotionally consequential reading of the Haydn, one of the composer’s late great London symphonies, he and the players made everything count…. In the long and eventful first movement, the conductor and his adopted San Francisco players mustered a premonitory pressure in the slow opening bars. When the valve was released, in the quickening second subject, the driving impetus kicked in. Robertson turned the angular shifts and whirling development into an urgent musical argument, punctuated by hairpin-turn dynamics and dramatically sudden rests.”