Esa-Pekka Salonen and SF Symphony Partner With Choreographer Alonzo King and Director Peter Sellars For Multidisciplinary Program

On June 7–9, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony partner with two creative visionaries—director Peter Sellars and choreographer Alonzo King—for a multidisciplinary program highlighting opera and dance.  

The program opens with Alonzo King LINES Ballet performing Maurice Ravel’s complete Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose), choreographed by King. Ravel’s 1912 ballet began several years earlier as a suite of “Five Children’s Pieces for Piano Four Hands,” which Ravel later orchestrated into a suite and then the staged ballet version. He found inspiration in children’s stories from 17th- and 18th-century collections, particularly Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales. In the ballet, Princess Florine pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and is cursed to die, but a Good Fairy intervenes so her curse is changed to 100 years of sleep, only to be awakened by true love’s kiss. To entertain the princess during her sleep, the Good Fairy provides her with dreams of fairy tales, including the stories of Beauty and the Beast, Tom Thumb, and Laideronnette, Empress of the Pagodas. 

“Working with Esa-Pekka Salonen is always deeply engaging, and I’m thrilled to collaborate with him and the San Francisco Symphony once more,” said King. “The LINES Ballet dancers are delving into the enchanting world of Ravel’s Ma mère l'Oye, infusing the story with our new interpretation.” 

These performances mark Salonen and the Symphony’s fourth collaboration with Alonzo King LINES Ballet: the Re-Opening Night concert in October 2021 saw the company perform Alberto Ginastera’s Estancia Suite; a concert film of Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, featuring LINES Ballet dancer Adji Cissoko, was released in June 2022; and a performance of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s digital SoundBox: Patterns, featured dancers Adji Cissoko and Shuaib Elhassan performing choreography by Alonzo King, released in April 2021.   

Peter Sellars directs the second half of the program—the San Francisco Symphony’s first performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s haunting 1909 one-act monodrama, Erwartung. The opera features a libretto by Marie Pappenheim that follows a woman searching for her lover in a forest at night. In these performances, soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams makes her Orchestral Series debut.   

“Arnold Schoenberg’s astounding Erwartung is a searing portrait of a woman pushed right to the edge in dark times,” said Sellars. “Public violence, instability, anxiety, and betrayal hang in the air as she awaits her missing lover. Flashbacks, stolen moments, secrets, and sudden sharp, blazing epiphanies throng her heart and her churning thoughts. Danger is everywhere, and freedom is an elusive dream. The love is real.”