The San Francisco Symphony’s promotional copy for SoundBox still hopes to hook you with craft cocktails and a club-like atmosphere. But in 2025, the experience goes deeper — and wider.
The program that composer and pianist Courtney Bryan curated for the Symphony’s first SoundBox performances this season, Jan. 31 – Feb 1, presented a significant collection of contemporary music hailing from the global African diaspora.
From the very first piece — Bryan’s own Fanfare for Moments of Courage, a spirited dialogue for one that clarinetist Matthew Griffith played with equal parts sensitivity and swagger — much of the music raced by.
In an evening that featured a dozen different selections, LaTasha Bundy’s 2021 solo violin piece Something Something Space stood out for its unusual synthesis of American fiddle and folk music with industrial idioms (think synthesizers and drum machines). Alas, the warm and nuanced performance that violinist Chen Zhao gave on Saturday was over almost as soon as it had begun.
Birdcalls careened through Afro-Caribbean riffs in Hannah Kendall’s Verdala, an evocative 2018 work for large ensemble, conducted here by Mert Yalniz. Elsewhere on the program, pianist John Wilson offered a limpid performance of the jangly neo-impressionist Sonatina by Roger Dickerson, an eminent composer and educator whose works should be better known.
Bryan said that her curatorial approach for SoundBox was shaped by the work of her mentor George Lewis, a composer and scholar who has written widely on the history of Black music. Lewis is equally ambitious in his own music: His 2018 sextet float, sting arrays chattering gestures and telescoping lines in abstract formations that sound like they could be either punishingly notated or totally improvised.
Lewis’s title, Bryan explained, echoes the motto of boxer Muhammad Ali: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” I would have been interested in hearing Bryan further explain how to listen the piece or why she liked it. Given the lack of printed programs at SoundBox, it seemed like a missed opportunity not to have had curatorial blurbs on the projector screens around the space, which instead ran mostly ambient visual loops. And supertitles for the songs would have been helpful — soprano Arianna Rodriguez sang richly and clearly in two separate selections, but the register was occasionally too high to make out the words.
Within the context of no context, it was the longer pieces — including Lewis’s bewildering one — that left the deepest impressions.
Expertly molding his tone to the tides of the music — here brilliant, there a wisp — Zhao made a welcome return to the stage in a more substantial solo piece, Tyshawn Sorey’s For Courtney Bryan. In structure, this expansive lyric recalls early-20th-century solo sonatas, yet its content is fresh.
Another highlight was Alvin Singleton’s 1988 string quartet Secret Desire to Be Black, a work with deep Bay Area roots, having been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. A mesmerizing slow-motion film of San Francisco dancer Babatunji Johnson accompanied this performance, which was finely graded by violinists Jeein Kim and Olivia Chen, violist Leonid Plashinov-Johnson, and cellist David Goldblatt.
Leaden pedal points and disparate ostinatos create wrenching harmonies against the first violin’s yearning line. Little by little, the patterns start to short-circuit in a torrent of sparks. When the passage finally burns out, the longed-for reprise feels dreamy, unsettling. What does the title mean? Singleton was once asked and only said, “It’s a secret.”
