The final score was 35–11. Team captain Mark Inouye and Jeff Anderson — San Francisco Symphony's principal trumpet and principal tuba, respectively — hit home run after home run on the field, as they habitually do at concerts. The lopsided score signaled the continued hegemony of the invincible SF Symphomaniacs, San Francisco Symphony's famed softball team that takes on local musicians in cities where they tour.
This time the opponent was the team from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and as SFS Communications Director Oliver Theil reports, “the day didn’t get much better for the musicians of the Met — right after the game, they were called back to Lincoln Center for a meeting with James Levine, who announced to the group his decision to step down as music director, a post he has held for four decades.”
The softball tradition began more than three decades ago, when then-Music Director Edo de Waart and SFS battled the NY Philharmonic Penguins. In 2003 and again last week, the SFS team played and defeated the Met musicians, rather than the Philharmonic team. One reason for the lineup is that the two orchestras' principal trumpets and team captains, Inouye and Ray Riccomini, are old friends.
In other victorious news, the SFS tour conquered with full houses and rave reviews at two concerts in Carnegie Hall, one in Washington's Kennedy Center, and one in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The New York tour signifies that SFS remains the only visiting orchestra to perform annually in Carnegie Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas programmed lesser-known works by Aaron Copland — greeted by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times as “three rarities drawn from before and after [Copland's] populist period” — and Schumann's Second Symphony.
The second Carnegie Hall concert offered a program Davies Hall audiences heard before leaving on the tour: Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with mezzo Sasha Cooke and tenor Simon O’Neill. Theil describes the scene:
With the nation’s lawmakers on break, flowers from Nanci Pelosi graced the backstage area, under a TV blaring game one of the Warrior’s playoff run. A fine performance of the Schubert/Mahler program, the band was greeted by Mason Bates, in town as Kennedy Center composer in residence and Jenny Bilfield, former executive director of Stanford Lively Arts and now at the Washington Performing Arts Society, which presented this performance.”
Of the Mahler, the Washington Post’s Anne Midgette wrote:
I heard details in the music that I can’t remember hearing with such clarity before, escalating — in part through ravishing playing from the solo oboe — to a moment near the end that dissolved in the same kind of tender purity that had marked the Schubert, with poignant intimacy.”
