A Kickass Performance of John Adams's Chamber Symphony

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music offers free concerts for the public almost every day of the week and you can get tickets by making reservations at their website (click here). On Saturday evening, I was drawn to an orchestral concert led by student conductors because one of the pieces was the wild, rarely performed 1992 Chamber Symphony of local composer John Adams. Along the way, I ran into Chenier Ng, one of the most dedicated music lovers in the world.

The concert began with Haydn's Symphony No. 59, nicknamed "The Fire Symphony," in a surprisingly vivid performance conducted by Donald Lee III, who brought passion, interesting dynamics, and a liveliness that is often absent when San Francisco's professional ensembles play the composer's music.

According to the program notes, Lee is a multi-hyphenate musician: pianist, conductor, and vocal accompanist. If he can conduct Haydn this well, he can probably do anything.

This was followed by Adams's Chamber Symphony conducted by Chih-Yao Chang from Taiwan in an astonishingly accomplished, kickass performance. There is a well-known anecdote Adams tells about the genesis of this work. He was studying the score of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony at home while his 7-year-old son Sam was watching TV cartoons with their manic musical soundtracks, and the two merged in his mind like a surrealist Looney Tunes animation. He also notes that "Despite all the good humor, my Chamber Symphony turned out to be shockingly difficult to play." No kidding.

Young musicians are often quite brilliant with contemporary music that confounds their elders and this performance was a good example, a more exact and exciting version than I heard 10 years ago at the SF Symphony. Concertmaster Aleksy Aretsky (above) was superb in both the Haydn and this outing, and Diego Rodriguez (above, back left) miraculously made my least favorite instrument, the piccolo, sound varied and gorgeous. This was especially important because at times the three-movement symphony sounds like a concerto for piccolo and chamber orchestra.

Conductor Chih-Yao Chang kept all the competing musical threads and cross-cutting time signatures clear, even when the score sounds like it's about to be a car wreck. He's got a bright future. I didn't stay for the second half of the concert, which was Beethoven's Egmont Overture and Piano Concerto #1 because no matter how good the performance, it would have sounded like weak tea after the Chamber Symphony.