concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I did it; I went up to the City for a concert. My first since December 2, including the 3 I had tickets for in the last month but skipped due to omicron. Restrictions have been relaxed, but not inside Davies Hall: they're still requiring booster verification and a 95-level mask. I ate takeout in my car rather than going to a restaurant for dinner (there's some great independent takeout places in the City), and though I was strongly attracted by the night's program, few others were. The hall was fairly empty, with not another person in my box. So I felt rather safe.

This was the Michael Morgan memorial concert, which is why I was so eager to attend. The Oakland Symphony music director had programmed and was scheduled to conduct this concert, but he died unexpectedly last August. The varied and eclectic selection of works was put on as Morgan originally programmed it - a rather rare thing when a planned conductor becomes unavailable - but it took three conductors to do it: one African-American like Morgan himself, and two of Asian birth and North American residence.

Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser led the vocal part of the program, which included arrangements of some spirituals associated with Black churches, plus Brahms's Alto Rhapsody, an aria associated with the great Marian Anderson. Mezzo Melody Wilson has a voice of dark precision, but unfortunately not powerful enough, at least in the vast precincts of Davies, to carry above Jack Perla's overenthusiastic orchestration for the spirituals. The Brahms worked better.

Earl Lee led a pair of dramatic tone poems. Amen! by Carlos Simon attempts to convey the spirit of a Pentecostal church service in only 13 minutes of orchestral music, with a lot of wailing for trombones in the fast sections and many blues-like passages for solo winds in the slow ones. Le Chasseur maudit (The Accursed Huntsman) by Cesar Franck is one of those grittingly specific French tone poems on alarming supernatural topics of which Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre are better-known examples. Truth to tell, they're deservedly better-known. This interpretation of a gory 18C ballad of a nobleman who goes hunting on a Sunday until the flames of Hell get him for his impiety fluffs irregularly around and does not sound in the least like anything else by Franck I've ever heard.

Akiko Fujimoto led the big piece on the program, Florence Price's Third Symphony, a marvelous work which I've heard Morgan conduct in Oakland, and from others on a couple of other occasions. This was a slow and darkly blended interpretation which kept Price's distinct sound-world intact and did well by the formal beauties of the slow movement, but which slightly dampened the energy and jauntiness of the rest of the work. Except insofar as the percussion really stood out in the scherzo and finale, it carried the slightly stuffy air of the Second New England School, i.e. as if Amy Beach had written it. An odd way to go, but that slow movement was a beauty.