SF Symphony Chamber Music

The SF Symphony's Chamber Music Series at Davies Hall offered a thoroughly wonderful concert last Sunday afternoon. It started with Jessie Montgomery's 2006 Strum for string quartet and double bass which involved not only strumming but lots of pizzicato plucking, sounding at times like a synthesis of classical Western and rural bluegrass music. The five string players (left to right: Wyatt Underhill, violin; Jessie Fellows, violin; Daniel G. Smith, double bass; Barbara Bogatin, cello; and Katie Kadarauch, viola) seemed to enjoy theselves immensely and were high-fiving each other offstage after they finished.

I rarely go to chamber music concerts at Davies Hall because it is a huge auditorium rather than a "chamber," but I wanted to hear Britten's rarely performed 1954 Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain. The music is set to an Edith Sitwell poem mixing crucifixion imagery with being bombed during the London blitz, and it is one of Britten's best works. It was performed splendidly by tenor Nicholas Phan who described Britten's five Canticles as "art songs on steroids."

The accompanists were exquisite, with John Wilson on piano and Daniel Hawkins on horn. The vocalist and musical instruments are at cross-purposes through most of the work until the final, unison stanza where piano, horn and voice fade into a perfect, ethereal silence.

After intermission, a dozen SF Symphony musicians arrived onstage to play Dvorak's 1878 Serenade in D Minor for Wind Instruments, one of the composer's first successful works in the concert hall. Over the last couple of months, I've heard one disappointing Dvorak performance after another from different ensembles, so expectations were not high, but the 40-minute piece was given an enchanting performance.

Watching the conductorless ensemble play off of each other was a joy, and so was seeing orchestra members who are usually hidden behind the strings, like bassonist Steven Dibner above.

The star of the performance was Jeannie Psomas on clarinet who sounded like a born Bohemian.