The second MTT memorial was the annual Pride Concert of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, a group of LGBTQIA+ and allies, held at the SF Conservatory's concert hall. It was pretty well packed.
The highlight of the concert was the local premiere of a song cycle by Jake Heggie, titled "Good Morning, Beauty," to poems by the performance artist Taylor Mac, who refers to the poems as "a present to queers in long-term relationships," and they're about the long-termness of it. It says: "Good morning, beauty / How are you here? / How has it happened? / Year after year?" The art song settings with elaborate orchestration was conducted by music director Robert Mollicone and sung by mezzo Nikola Printz, who went ambigender in an outfit that was a man's black suit on the right and a woman's white dress on the left. And the dedication in the program book read "to the memory of Michael Tilson Thomas and Joshua Robison, whose fifty years together embodied everything the piece celebrates."
Also on the program, a suite reconstruction of the orchestral music for the 1939 Wizard of Oz, a movie with iconic status in this community, composed by Herbert Stothart (who won an Oscar for doing so), based partly on the song melodies by Harold Arlen (who also won an Oscar for that).
And Brahms's Third Symphony. Why Brahms, who as far as we know was straight? Let Mellicone explain: "This felt like a great tie-in for Pride not only due to the broad spectrum of emotions involved, but also because of the musical code embedded in the opening (and recurrent) statement of the work: Frei aber Froh, or 'Free yet Joyful.'" It was a somewhat hairy performance, with things oddly sticking out of Brahms's mellow texture, but nicely and passionately performed.
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