Conductor Marin Alsop has finally brought her love of big-boned, emotionally demonstrative music to the San Francisco Symphony.
Making her subscription series debut at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, April 10, the renowned 68-year-old music director led a pulse-quickening program that matched her highly physical conducting style with two Latin American works, two fanfares, and Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1.
It was a big night for the boys in the back — the percussion, trumpet, and trombone players — and it began with Ed Stephan’s extroverted timpani solo opening Gabriela Ortiz’s 2018 piece Antrópolis. The entire 10-minute work is percussion-driven, depicting Mexico City’s dance halls and the orchestras that used to play there. (The title is the composer’s own neologism meaning “nightclub city.”) The score is intentionally lighter in mood, but the succession of styles and ideas was dazzling in the Symphony’s virtuosic performance.
Gabriela Montero’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (“Latin”) from 2016 also dives into dance music but with a more serious purpose. The composer, who was also the soloist on Thursday, conceived the piece, as she explained to the audience while the stage was being set up, as a follow-up to her “intense, crushing” 2011 work Ex Patria, which mourns the more than 19,000 homicide victims in her native Venezuela that year. While one thinks of the music of Latin America as reflecting diverse dance styles and “fun times,” she said, “in the concerto I wanted to talk about the underlying chiaroscuro,” or darker side, and “a lot of things I’m concerned about as a human rights activist.”
That tension is felt in the concerto’s opening measures, which features an unadorned, briefly harmonized melody in slow tempo that turns cinematic when it’s grounded by a soft bass note from the low strings. That moves straight into a jazzy mambo but with agitated string figures and offbeat stingers and riffs in the trumpets.
The piano is rarely silent in this piece and controls the pace, but the orchestra is important as a counterweight, adding a sighing melody to the second-movement Andante’s main tune. While the pianist easily transforms the music mid-movement into a dance, the drama builds as well. As the climax approaches, the brass interject warning shots and finally erupt in pelting triplets in the trumpets. The third movement, based on a well-known Venezuelan tune, heightens the central contrast, descending, as the composer said, “into darkness, blood magic and superstition.”
Montero was a brilliant soloist in her concerto and drew a deserved ovation. As an encore, she called on members of the audience to suggest a tune by singing a few bars, on which she improvised with utmost musicality and elegance.
The concert’s second half began with Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1. The latter, not coincidentally, is dedicated to Alsop.
The optimism of these works well suited Barber’s symphony, composed in 1936 but significantly revised in the winter of 1942–1943. Like Jean Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, Barber’s composition compresses four movements into one; though short, it is bright with energy and ideas. Alsop’s interpretation has been well honed: She’s conducted the piece with several orchestras and recorded it. The San Francisco Symphony responded passionately and gave a performance that added delicacy and sweetness to the confident opening Allegro. Sections were well balanced throughout, and Alsop brought out many details of the remarkable score.
It’s hard to imagine Alsop, who seems to have the energy of 10 people, not inspiring an orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony was on its mettle under her direction. This was a debut too long delayed, but welcome nonetheless.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
