concert review: Stockton Symphony

Stockton? Yes, at over 300,000 one of the larger cities in California's flat and fertile Central Valley, it was founded as a river port to support the Gold Rush and named for the US Navy officer who directed California's capture in the Mexican War. It flourished for many years, but its civic profile in recent decades hasn't been sterling: blight, unemployment, school shootings, civic bankruptcy. For most in the Bay Area, there's not much reason to visit except to drive past on the way somewhere else.

But I found a reason. Stockton compensates with civic pride. It has pride for its symphony, which turns out to be a pretty good orchestra, performing in a community college auditorium with subtle amplification. And it has pride for its multi-cultural, uh, culture, which expressed itself in this ingenious concert program: seven works, each representing one of Stockton's sister cities around the world, most composed by someone who came from within hailing distance of that particular city. It attracted me for its sparkling variety, and turned out to be worth the trouble.

One of the sister cities, Parma, Italy, was easy. Parma is the urban center around the home town of Giuseppe Verdi. So the concert concluded with the triumph scene from Act 2 of Aida, brightly performed by the orchestra, with a collection of three local choruses (two of them from the two local colleges) singing powerfully behind them.

Stockton's sister city in Mexico is in Sonora, and that's the home state of Arturo Márquez. But instead of his famous Danzon No. 2, we heard his Conga del fuego nuevo, which applies the same vivid dance character to a conga.

Some of the compositions were themselves multi-cultural. The great Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu was represented, for instance, not by any of his characteristic impressionist mysticism, but by a couple pieces of his 1950s-60s film music, which evoked their movies' settings by being a jazzy blues and a melancholy Viennese waltz.

The impressionism came in a movement from the African Suite by Fela Sowande, applying that technique to a folk melody from his native land of Nigeria.

Chen Yi was born in the Cantonese region of China (sister city, check) but now lives in the US, having taught for many years in Kansas City, for whose anniversary she wrote a KC Capriccio, which turns out to be a raucous work with chorus that, while rather modernist, is so lively and good-humored as to be fun to listen to.

Cambodia's king Norodom Sihanouk was also a songwriter and jazz musician, and some of his work was arranged by Andre Kostelanetz into a suite which sounds like typical Kostelanetz pops work with just a bit of what must be Cambodian flavor to it.

The ringer in the bunch was Bernard Green, an American tv composer who did once produce an Overture on Philippine Folk Songs, some of which came from the Visayas region where the sister city of Iloilo is.

There were also a couple fanfares by local Stockton composers, one of which had some historical note. The city's port director in the 1930s, Benjamin Allin, was also an amateur composer, and in their files was a piano score of his Port Stockton March, which current Symphony conductor Peter Jaffe arranged for orchestra to bring out both its Sousa-like energy and an allusion to the Aida march that he spotted in the central section accompaniment. It too was great fun.