Bay Area Rainbow Symphony Concert

After a lovely day at the San Francisco No Kings march, we attended a Gay Pride concert at the SF Conservatory of Music given by the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony. The volunteer ensemble is sometimes overmatched by the serious music they are playing and sometimes they excel way out of their league. Saturday night's concert offered a bit of both. The great violinist and conductor Dawn Harms recently retired as Music Director and the orchestra has been auditioning different conductors throughout the season. Saturday night was the turn of Oakland-based conductor/composer/flautist Martha Stoddard who led the orchestra in the 1943 Overture by Grazna Bacewicz, and a 1941 Britten transcription of Mahler's second movement of his Third Symphony, entitled What the Wild Flowers Tell Me.

Neither piece made much of an impression, but that changed radically when the orchestra performed the American premiere of Juan Sebastian Cardona Ospina's 2022 Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra with professional soloist Jimmy Chan.

Chan gave a brief demonstration of the different pitches and sonic possibilities of the four timpani and then proceeded to play the heck out of the instruments, from delicate pianissimos to full-on pounding, in the three-movement concerto.

After growing up and studying in Colombia, the 33-year-old Ospina went to the University of Memphis for further composition education, returned to Colombia where his music was widely acclaimed, and moved to Emeryville in 2022. I heard his Concerto for Saxophone and Wind Instruments last year and was amazed at the sophistication, energy and sheer fun of the piece, and this Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra was just as thrilling.

For an encore, Chan played his own transcription for marimba of a familiar tune that I was on the verge of identifying but never quite did. It was a delicate, lovely sorbet after the wild main course.

After intermission, Stoddard conducted the 1902 Sibelius Symphony No. 3. She must know and love the work well because the performance was surprisingly good. The trombone and trumpet sections were having a rough time in terms of intonation all evening, but the rest of the orchestra did a splendid job. Especially impressive were the flute section of Linda Watkins, Alan Berquist, and Matt Opatrny, and congratulations to violist/president Laurence Lewis (standing next to Stoddard) for presenting such a challenging program.