1 1/2 concerts

Saratoga Symphony, Sunday: This community orchestra gave a fairly rarified program under Jason Klein, the best-known piece being the Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 by George Enescu, played with sufficient liveliness and drive. Plus A Fugal Overture by Gustav Holst, which wasn't very fugal, and two unusual turn-of-the-20C tone poems, neither apparently ever played in the U.S. before: The Witch of Atlas by Granville Bantock, a character which in the Shelley poem it's based on is more of a benevolent angel than a witch, and which was accordingly represented in peaceful music with a lot of solos for violin and English horn; and The Isle of the Dead by the Swedish composer Andreas Hallén, one of numerous tone poems based on the Arnold Böcklin painting, but unlike any of the other composers, who treated it as dark and ominous, Hallén preferred to depict the consolatory aspect of death, and after a mournful beginning his composition turns gentle and even incongruously lush in a slightly Wagnerian manner.

San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, Saturday: I attended this, or rather part of it, by livestream. Student conductors led Beethoven's goofy King Stephen Overture and Revueltas's Sensemayá, the latter with firm enough rhythm but nevertheless sludgy. Music director Edwin Outwater, a former assistant to MTT, dedicated the concert to MTT's memory, pointing out that all the pieces were ones he'd play, and led the orchestra in John Adams's Absolute Jest, his concerto for string quartet and orchestra, much better-balanced than the last time I'd heard it, but at which the Esmé Quartet were wasted as soloists, their exquisite approach to Romantic music having no role in Adams's jerky and rigid postmodernism. But I was too tired to sit in my work chair and listen to the concluding piece, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, so I skipped it.