concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Once again, I'm called in as emergency fill-in reviewer of an SFS concert I was going to be attending anyway. And the reason I was going? The chance to hear Samuel Barber's First Symphony, which used to be considered one of the cornerstone rocks of the modern Americanist repertoire. But not at SFS, I guess, where it hadn't been heard since 1963, under the guest baton of Howard Mitchell, a conductor even more forgotten than the Barber Symphony is. Wow, it takes me back to my student days, when names like these were still current.

Anyway, how this tough piece, which hearing live finally got me to feel acquainted with, wound up on the end of a program of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, I don't know, but I'm glad it did. Here's the review.