Every conductor who comes to the San Francisco Symphony brings something different to the music. Thomas Wilkins, who leads the orchestra in two performances this weekend, just might bring the audience.
Equally at home at the Boston Symphony Orchestra as at the Hollywood Bowl (he holds positions at both organizations), Wilkins has made a career of inviting people into the rarefied world of classical music. Sure, he conducts the masterworks, but he seems to take especial pleasure in music with broad appeal. As he conducted an all-American program at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday, Oct. 25, he often wore a broad smile — even when the going got tough.
And who could keep a straight face listening to the strutting clarinet solo at the beginning of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? The now-iconic slide that opens the work, delivered with swagger by the Symphony’s principal clarinet, Carey Bell, was improvised by the musician who first played it 100 years ago, as the composer riffed along on piano.
The rest of the piece is a kaleidoscope of ragtime, the blues, and above all, the music of Tin Pan Alley, the Manhattan strip where a teenage Gershwin had worked in the 1910s as a song plugger, an in-store performer made to push the latest sheet music for sale. Rhapsody may lack the title of “concerto,” but its flashy solos and catchy tunes have attracted a century’s worth of famous pianists to Davies — including Gershwin himself in 1937.
Pianist Michelle Cann, making her Symphony debut, played the solo part with reassuring warmth and rare fineness, notably in the velvety melodies and lace-edged cadenzas she spun. Her steely rhythm prevailed even in the few wobbly moments when Wilkins’s way of moving a phrase seemed to catch the orchestra by surprise. Communication issues aside, this piece can’t help but come off successfully, and Friday’s audience clearly loved it.
Shaky ensemble added to the tumult of the storm scene from Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The other numbers in this 1943 arrangement by Robert Russell Bennett, dubbed A Symphonic Picture,” include “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “Clara, Clara,” and they were lovely by contrast, ending the program on a high note.
The other suite on the program, Charlie Harmon’s 1998 arrangement of music from Leonard Bernstein’s mid-century operetta Candide, sounded pasted together. There were more than a few sticking points as the orchestra moved from one number to the next, though the appropriately expedient tango “I Am Easily Assimilated” and the seedy “Paris Waltz” were characterized perfectly.
Coming after intermission, Wood Notes, a four-movement suite by the Black American composer William Grant Still, interrupted the variety show at just the right time. Still, who was born three years before Gershwin, wrote a slew of ambitious works over a five-decade career, including nine operas and five symphonies. This pastoral suite, which was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1948, had “a social significance,” wrote the composer in a program note at the time. Wood Notes was inspired by the poetry of Joseph Mitchell Pilcher, and Still described the piece as “a collaboration between a Southern white man and a Southern-born Negro composer, in which both of the participants were enthused over the project.”
In its day, this was a mighty accomplishment indeed. The music is perhaps of modest scope. Pilcher’s plainspoken poetry reverberates in diaphanous textures and simple melodies. Falling leaves flutter about the woodwinds, the lower strings murmur in a restless stream of eighth notes, and the moonlight gleams in phrases predictable yet pleasant as they come.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
