Verdi's Requiem at the SF Symphony

The 2024-2025 SF Symphony season was scheduled to begin last fall with music for chorus and large orchestra by Gordon Getty (pictured above) and Verdi's Requiem. However, it was canceled at the last moment because management was threatening draconian cuts to the paid members of the Symphony Chorus and when there was pushback, management canceled the concerts. Nine months later, the concert was rescheduled with conductor James Gaffigan replacing the recently departed Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who had his own issues with SF Symphony management.

I wrote a mean assessment of Gordon Getty ten years ago (click here) when the SF Opera presented his one-act The Fall of the House of Usher in 2015. In an older, more forgiving mood, let's just say that I am happy he donates so much money to musical institutions locally. That money probably helped to subsidize the Verdi Requiem performance Sunday afternoon that followed twenty minutes of Getty's three songs for chorus and orchestra with poetry written by the composer himself. He was even kind enough to pose for a photo with my spouse.

The Friday evening opener received mixed reviews from Michael Zwiebach and Joshua Kosman, but something came together two days later for a truly magnificent performance on Sunday afternoon. (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The four soloists were soprano Rachel Willis-Sorensen, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, tenor Mario Chang, and bass Morris Robinson, and they were all in great voice which presumably was not the case on Friday evening.

Though I worship Verdi, I had never connected with his Requiem in a live performance before. It had always sounded overlong, bombastic, and dull in its quieter moments, but on Sunday afternoon everything clicked. Conductor James Gaffigan leaned into the operatic nature of the work and led a gripping rendition of of the mass's 90 minutes of meditation on heaven and hell. It was one of the best performances I have heard from him with this orchestra in some time.

It also helped that the soloists were so good. The voice of mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, in particular, carried over the huge orchestra and chorus while sounding like creamy butter, and Morris Robinson's bass was powerful enough that it sounded like he could personally open the gates of heaven or hell.

The chorus, saved from penury by an anonymous donor at the beginning of the season, was superb throughout, with a dynamic range from soft to loud that was remarkable.

Congratulations to everyone for making me fall in love with Verdi's Requiem for the very first time.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's Resurrection

The San Francisco Symphony is closing out its season this weekend with three performances of Mahler's gargantuan Symphony No. 2, "Resurrection." These are also the final performances of the orchestra with Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who declined to extend his contract after the Symphony Board of Directors completely alienated him with their penny-wise, pound-foolish fiscal austerity. So Friday evening's performance was both an extraordinary artistic triumph that people will be referencing for years to come and a bittersweet farewell between the conductor and an adoring audience.

The Symphony Board also proposed to radically cut compensation last year for the brilliant Symphony Chorus under the direction of Jenny Wong, but thankfully an anonymous donor came through recently with a $1 million gift to make sure the ensemble had a halfway decent contract. They sounded gorgeous tonight, slowly, softly and then powerfully taking us to heaven in the final movement.

The two soloists were mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and soprano Heidi Stober, both in beautiful voice.

The entire performance was Esa-Pekka Salonen at his best and most illuminating, and the hall radiated a communal joy among performers and audience. Thanks above all to writer Lisa Hirsch who offered a last-minute ticket when her date could not make it. And for a wonderful piece on Thursday's performance, click here for Patrick Vaz's take.

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.”

Anxious Music at the SF Symphony

Departing SF Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led a smashing concert over the weekend that included a commissioned world premiere and two major, banging works by Prokofiev and Stravinsky that were composed just before World War One. The concert started with Strange Beasts, the 20-minute commissioned piece by a young black composer, Xavier Muzik, pictured above. (All photos are courtesy of Kristen Loken.)

Muzik gave a sweet, rambling intro that repeated the program notes where he mentioned that he suffered from anxiety attacks, particularly during the COVID pandemic while living in Los Angeles, and that one of his solutions was to photograph the world around him. Some of those photos were used as part of a quirky multimedia slideshow of skyscrapers looming like Godzilla and what appeared to be claustrophobic gatherings of fans during an LA Dodgers World Series parade. What set the visuals apart from other symphonic multimedia shows I've encountered was that the images were intermittent, appearing during less than half of the course of the music, and they mostly stayed up for less than a second in an anxiety-producing strobe effect.

The music took a while to gain traction, but once it did, with a woodblock propulsively driving the huge orchestra along, it was intermittently engaging, and yes, anxious-making. From the looks of his website, this was Muzik's first big orchestra commission, and it was impressive how well he composed for the entire ensemble. I'd like to hear it again.

This was followed by the agonizingly slow Ascent of the Grand Piano from the basement, whereupon Daniil Trifonov stormed his way through Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 2. Prokofiev composed the piece in 1912, fresh from the St. Petersburg Conservatory at age 21, then lost the score in a fire before fleeing the Russian Revolution and literally traveling around the world for the next decade. He reconstructed the concerto from memory in Paris in 1923, and it's an insanely difficult, complex piece to play.

This was my first time seeing Trifonov play after reading about him over the last decade, and he didn't disappoint in terms of virtuosity and an idiosyncratic musical intelligence. However, he didn't seem to be doing the score many favors with some of his musical choices, and the concerto started to sound more wildly eccentric and unfocused than it actually is. In contrast, Yefim Bronfman played the same work with the SF Symphony in 2019 and it was such a perfecly calibrated performance that the audience applauded after each movement, usually a no-no, but in that case well deserved (click here).

Still, it was fascinating to see Trifonov in person, looking like one of those classical music "long-hairs" that were featured in movies from the 1920s onwards. And in his encore, where he played with a gentleness that was absent in most of the Prokofiev, he was exquisite.

After intermission, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Igor Stravinsky's still-shocking 1912 ballet score Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) in a brightly colored performance that had the orchestra playing at its best. It was also a delight to hear the new principal bassoon player, Joshua Elmore, playing the famous opening strains of the score.

Thanks to Disney's Fantasia, I long associated The Rite of Spring with dinosaurs stomping around, but the ballet is actually depicting the ritual sacrifice of a young woman. That's always anxious making.

Shostakovich and Mahler at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony offered a meaty program this week that started with the Russian-American pianist Kirill Gerstein playing Shostakovich's 1957 Piano Concerto #2 in a buoyant, joyful performance. The work was written for Dmitri Shostakovich's son Maxim for his Conservatory final, and it's a delightful outlier in the composer's later compositions, sounding a bit like early Prokofiev.

The guest conductor was Estonian-American Paavo Järvi who matched the pianist in both the brightness of the outer movements and the meditative beauty of the Andante in the center.

Gerstein seemed to be having a ball playing the piece and he was brought back three times by the audience on Friday evening before playing an encore by Rachmaninoff, the Mélodie from his Salon Pieces.

After intermission, Järvi conducted a huge orchestra in Mahler's 1905 Symphony #7, a sprawling behemoth in five movements that is the least popular and performed among the composer's nine symphonies. Usually, the work lasts about 80 minutes but there's a recording by Otto Klemperer that is 100 minutes long and a recording by Hermann Scherchen that is 68 minutes long. Paavo Järvi's account was closer to the Scherchen, which worked well for the hard-driving first movement, but was less effective in the three "night music" movements in the middle, where the bright lights stayed on and there was no mystery or darkness. After a while, everything started to sound the same.

In any rendition, what is most remarkable about the symphony is how every instrument or grouping of instruments has its solo moments, as if this were a chamber work. At times, it sounded like The Old Person's Guide to the Orchestra (apologies, Benjamin Britten), and the various sections were sounding fabulous, including the trumpets led by principal Mark Inouye.

Also impressive were the contributions of all the wind instruments throughout, and the rondo finale where all heck breaks loose was a joy.

John Adams and Carl Orff, Together at Last at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony is presenting a world premiere piano concerto by John Adams this weekend followed by Carl Orff's "dramatic cantata" Carmina Burana. Presaging the odd juxtaposition, the concert started with the 1906 The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. It's a strange little piece that consists of a lovely, meditative tune for strings, interrupted intermittently by a plaintive off-stage horn asking the question and a quartet of flutes squabbling dissonantly with the answer. It was a great joy hearing principal trumpeter Mark Inouye again (above) after an extended sabbatical.

Two years ago, the SF Symphony and the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performed John Adams's second piano concerto from 2018 entitled Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? It was a sensational performance of a manic, hard-driving piece and it so impressed the composer that he offered to write a new piano concerto for Ólafsson, which he entitled After The Fall. (Photo by Brandon Patoc)

Thursday was the world premiere of the 30-minute concerto and it was quite a contrast to the fiendish Devil and his Tunes. There were the usual Adams kaleidescope of rapidly changing time signatures and motoric rhythms, but the overall impression was of a colorful gentleness. The piece starts out softly, sounding a bit like Ravel with many sparkling sounds in the orchestra, and the piano makes its way through quite a journey in three uninterrupted movements, ending as softly as it began. For a good, detailed description of the music, check out Lisa Hirsch at the San Francisco Classical Voice website. (Photo above is pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and guest conductor David Robertson.)

It was easy to get lost listening to a dense piece of music for the first time so I looked into buying a cheap ticket for one of the two remaining performances on Saturday or Sunday, but the nosebleed second tier seats which usually cost about $30-$50 were instead being offered for the dynamic pricing amount of $225. (Photo of conductor David Robertson, composer John Adams, and pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is by Brandon Patoc)

This was not because the entire world was clamoring to see an important world premiere by John Adams, but because of the massive popularity of Carmina Burana, Carl Orff's 1936 hour-long cantata about fortune, nature, drinking, love, and sex. I had seen the work in 2012 at Davies Hall in a staged version by Opera Parallele's Brian Staufenbiel with the San Francisco Choral Society, but this was the first time hearing the crude, melodic, crowd-pleaser full blast with the entire SF Symphony and Chorus along with the SF Girls' Chorus and a trio of starry soloists.

Soloists soprano Susanna Phillips and baritone Will Liverman were both excellent, as was the orchestra under David Robertson. (Photo by Brandon Patoc)

Tenor Arnold Livingston Geis (above right) hammed it up as the dying swan, which was entirely appropriate, and William Liverman (above left) had such a beautiful baritone voice that it was good to hear he'll be returning to the city this summer for SF Opera's production of La Boheme.

Soprano Susanna Phillips was luxury casting in a small role where she basically sings whether or not she should lose her virginity or remain a proper maiden. (She eventually chooses the former option.)

The real star of the evening was the SF Symphony Chorus, which finally reached a financial settlement with penny-pinching management after an anonymous donor put up $4 million to pay the 32 professional singers who are the core of the ensemble. They sounded great, even though I never want to hear the opening and closing song, O Fortuna, ever again in this lifetime.

Ray Chen and James Gaffigan at the SF Symphony

This weekend's San Francisco Symphony concerts were a mixed bag. It began with conductor James Gaffigan leading the orchestra in the 2016 Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by the talented 44-year-old American composer, Missy Mazzoli. This wondrous, ten-minute piece was making its SF Symphony debut, and it actually sounded like the cosmos spinning, no mean feat. I hope it becomes a concert opener staple.

This was followed by violin soloist Ray Chen playing the 1940 Violin Concerto of Samuel Barber. Even though it's an often-performed standard, I wasn't familiar with the work at all, so went to YouTube and listened to a performance featuring violinist Joshua Bell. "That music sure is dull," my spouse commented. "Let's try this version with Ray Chen, who we'll be seeing tonight," I replied. By the end, the jury agreed, "This is a gorgeous piece of music." (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

The performance on Thursday's opening night was hard-charging, which seemed at odds with the gentleness of the first two movements, but it was an interesting approach that made the piece sound more anguished than meditative. The problem was that Gaffigan had the orchestra playing too loudly, drowning out Chen at various climactic moments. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

Chen's performance, however, was flawless, bringing out the pathos of the Andante movement, and reveling in the pyrotechnics of the final Presto movement.

Chen addressed the audience before playing an encore. Born in Taiwan, raised in Australia, and until recently living in Philadelphia, Chen announced that he had just moved to California, which prompted applause from the audience. "Unfortunately, I just settled in Los Angeles, and I'm in a state of shock right now" on account of the fires currently destroying the city. "This piece fits my mood right now," he continued, before playing Eugène Ysaÿe's Obsession from his Violin Sonata No. 2. Starting with a J.S. Bach quote, it's a wild, knotty piece that felt fitting.

The second half of the concert was dedicated to Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, a triumphant 45-minute hymn to Mother Russia at the end of World War Two. After Gaffigan's "rather vigorous conducting" (as my London seatmate put it) of the Barber concerto, I was worried about Gaffigan's approach to the Prokofiev symphony, which already leans toward incoherent bombast, particularly its long first movement. The worry was fitting because the performance sounded like Gaffigan was trying to see how fast and how loud he could have the orchestra play, with hardly any modulation or quiet moments. Hearing the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony can be a great, exciting experience, but by the end of this concert I felt bludgeoned. (Photo above is by Kristen Loken.)

10 Favorite Musical Moments of 2024

The San Francisco Ballet Orchestra is one of the great unsung ensembles in the Bay Area and beyond. In a February program called British Icons they performed Mahler's dark, hour-long Das Lied von Erde for British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan's ballet The Song of the Earth. The orchestra was joined by mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Beteag (above) and tenor Moisés Salazar, who were both wonderful.

Later in February, Taylor Mac brought his ongoing four-and-a-half hour, intermissionless, queer rock opera, Bark of Millions, to Cal Performances at UC Berkeley. The joyful surprise of the show was how good the music was, 55 original songs with lyrics by Taylor Mac and music by Matt Ray (above).

Scent cannons, lightshows, and a huge orchestra were all involved in the San Francisco Symphony's double bill of Scriabin's Prometheus: Poem of Fire and Bartok's opera Bluebeard's Castle. The March concert at Davies Hall was quite a trip.

SFMOMA presented a surprising, fascinating exhibit, The Art of Noise, which was part album covers and posters; part audio playback machines from the Victrola to Bang & Olufsen; and a high fidelity room where a DJ would play their favorite recordings.

The San Francisco Opera's summer season offered two knockout productions, starting with Kaija Saariaho's final opera, Innocence, centering on the fallout from a school shooting in Helsinki. A perfect cast in a perfect production made this one of the most memorable pieces of theater I have ever seen.

The second success was Handel's gender-bending comedy, Partenope with a cast that clicked together brilliantly, highlighted by soprano Julia Fuchs and countertenor Carlo Vistoli (seen above).

The American Bach Soloists had a short summer festival in July that included an utterly charming concert of Italian secular cantatas by Handel and Vivaldi at St. Marks Lutheran Church, with the excellent soprano vocal soloists Maya Kherani and Sarah Coit singing with a great original instrument chamber orchestra.

The highlight of the fall SF Opera season for me was the dark, distressing The Handmaid's Tale, a 1998 adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel by Danish composer Poul Ruders. The new co-production with the Danish National Opera and SF Opera was both stripped down and cinematic, and the entire large cast was flawless.

In November, the Canadian conductor Bernard Labadie brought an early music approach to an all-Mozart program with the San Francisco Symphony, highlighted by British soprano Lucy Crowe singing obscure concert arias by the composer. The entire concert was a joyful surprise.

In December, San Francisco Performances presented the Pacifica Quartet at Herbst Theater with the star clarinetist Anthony McGill joining them for a new clarinet quintet by Ben Shirley and Brahms' Quintet for Clarinet and Strings. I have always wanted to hear the Brahms piece live and the exquisite performance surpassed expectations.