Znaider and SF Symphony champion overlooked concerto

[...] before Thursday, Feb. 18’s remarkably powerful concert in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony had never even played the piece.

Why is a work like this — so inventive, so dramatic, so rich in incident — not a standard component in the arsenal of any violin virtuoso aspiring to the name?

The harmonies are traditionally tonal, but their logic at times is not; and although the concerto unfolds in fairly cohesive chapters, the sequence of events within those sections can sometimes be surprising.

The arrival of the main melody in the first movement, a theme of almost jolly elegance, registered as a hard-fought passage out of the more emotionally fraught rhetoric of the slow introduction.

Even the witty final section, with a deceptively carefree tune that keeps going slightly out of kilter, sounded at once charming and oddly shadowy.

Znaider sustained the effect with a string tone that was lyrical throughout, but with a hard-driving edge that kept the score’s unpredictability at the fore.

“A Glimmer in the Age of Darkness,” composed in 2005 by the French composer Guillaume Connesson, is a 20-minute meditation on the cosmos, inspired by a magazine article about the universe’s early childhood.

Denève, who commissioned and premiered the piece, gave it a sensitive performance, with sweetly balanced playing by the orchestra.