Music of the Americas at the SF Symphony

The 68-year-old conductor Marin Alsop finally made her San Francisco Symphony debut on a subscription program last week that was dedicated to music from the Americas, North and South. It seemed a strange oversight that it took so long for Alsop to be invited to lead the orchestra, especially since she helmed the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz for 25 years and has recently been conducting prestigious orchestras in Europe. (All concert photos except the one below are by Brandon Patoc.)

The opener was a lively 2018 piece called Antrópolis by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz channeling the music of dance halls in Mexico City, punctuated by long solos for the timpani. It was ten minutes of fun, and a more auténtico version of Copland's El Salon Mexico. (Photo by Michael Strickland of the wonderful Associate Concertmaster Wyatt Underhill shaking hands with Marin Alsop.)

This was followed by the Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero playing her own 2016 Piano Concerto No. 1, Latin. Montero's pianism and charisma were a constant delight through the 3-movement, 30-minute piece, but the longer first two movements meandered between the moody and the highly rhythmic. The concerto didn't quite cohere for me until the short final movement whose dance music sounded like it could be appended to Antrópolis.

My concert companion, Chris Enquist, was a serious fan-boy at age 74 of Montero and had become entranced by her piano improvisations based on suggestions from audience numbers. Impromptu musical improvisation was a staple of 19th century pianist-composers such as Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt, while in the 20th century it has become the bedrock province of jazz. In an interesting profile of Montero in the program book, she talks about undergoing a neurological exam at Johns Hopkins: "What they found was really amazing. When I improvise, what I call 'getting out of the way' means that a different part of my brain is activated--one which doesn't really have anything to do with music. My visual cortex goes crazy, and that's what I improvise with. It kind of explains something: when I was a little girl, I would say to my father 'I have two brains.' "

For Friday night's encore, after asking for a tune to improvise on, a pitch-perfect soprano voice from a nearby balcony sang the first few bars of Unchained Melody. Montero didn't recognize the tune so she asked for a few more bars which the gorgeous sounding voice provided, and then the pianist turned to the audience and asked if we knew the song. There was general assent since everybody had seen Patrick Swayze at the potter's wheel with Demi Moore in Ghost, so Montero picked out the tune and spun out a fascinating five minutes of variations. My concert companion Chris stood up at the end and shouted, "YOU ARE AMAZING!"

After intermission, it became apparent this concert could have been called Time For Timpani as easily as Music of the Americas. Both Ortiz and Montero used the instrument extensively, as did the second half of the program. It opened with Copland's 1943 Fanfare for the Common Man and Joan Tower's 1986 feminist response, Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1 (the first of a set of six), which was dedicated to Marin Alsop. Both scores use only brass and percussion, with timpanist Edward Stephan above getting quite a workout.

The final work was Samuel Barber's 1936 Symphony No. 1 which coincidentally began with a soft introduction on the timpani. It's an exuberant, young composer's piece, and Alsop did a great job with it. Incidentally, I realized afterwards that all the works on the program were written by either women or gay men, and the concert was conducted by a lesbian. The fact that this was not mentioned anywhere in the marketing or program notes was odd, either a step forward where it wasn't worthy of special mention, or a step backward where we just don't talk about that kind of stuff in this political climate. In any case, let me leave you with Ms. Alsop's quote when she was asked by the The Times about the 2022 movie Tár: "So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”