SF Symphony Resident Conductor Benjamin Shwartz will lead the SF Youth Symphony on Sunday at Davies Symphony hall, in a program by Prokofiev, Bartok and Haydn. The orchestra musicians range from 12 to 20yo, and none of them was old enough to attend Benjamin's previous venture: Mercury Soul, a blend of classical music by 20th and 21st century composers with techno beats, performed, of all places, in a club, Mezzanine.

The mix sounded intriguing, and when we showed up there, there was a line the length of a football field out at the door. Alas. But the place was packed with a young, hip crowd there to see for composer/DJ Mason Bates spinning some neat beats. Shwartz was there conducting some chamber ensembles into pieces by Ligeti or Webern, and those are the composers that we had heard of; the rest was even more far out.

We asked Benjamin if his concert on Sunday was not too staid, after the invigorating Mercury Soul performance.

He laughed, as if Bartok or Prokofiev weren't 20th century enough. "This is part of the program going on tour this summer," he said, "and we're taking this and the next concert with the Youth Symphony to Europe in June and July. Bartok and Haydn, we don't play very much. It's all great music, and the youth orchestra has a different responsibility and a big and loyal audience. It's an educational institution, and it's part of our mission to introduce the musician to the canon of classical music. We try to play them new music as well, but in building an orchestra, we need to build the skills to play new, old music, and playing Haydn, Beethoven, develop the skills of an orchestra more than Bartok. People have to expand a rythmic sensibility to play Bartok, but it does not build the sound of an orchestra the way that Beethoven does. So with the SF Youth, we're a bit more conservative than other programs, we're more pedagogical."

Photo credits: picture of Maestro Shwartz (getting out of jail?) by Jennifer Hui Bon Hoa above; below Mercury Soul and Mason Bates by Guru Khalsa.

How about Mercury Soul, that was pretty cool, wasn't it?

"We were pretty stunned at how well everything went, given the number of moving parts and number of problems that could arise. Things went smoothly as planned and envisioned and we were delighted."

He added that the project "came about my meeting Mason Bates. We started talking about putting that project together. It came about asking ourselves: what do we want in a new music concert? We have felt trapped in new music concerts that were not fun and not an interesting concept. We would not want anyone to feel trapped in it. Also, we were trying to bring this music to a new kind of audience. There's been plenty of efforts to bring new music to classical music audiences. It has not worked very well. The people who love Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, do not necessarily like Ligeti. Mason and I share the thought that it's the non-regular symphony member, who might be more open minded, more attuned to this kind of music. That's the group that we were trying to reach."

And reached they did. Of course, playing music in a club, the audience was half-focused on the music, half-focused on getting drunk. We tried to listen carefully, but some just hung out with a beer in their hand. "We thought about that," says Benjamin. "We were trying to reach out to new audiences, specifically to people who had no idea about Ligeti, Dennehy, and we reached a lot of people that were excited. We also reach a lot of people who were not interested, we knew this would happen. It's fine with me, I hope that as we do this again, people would have a better idea for what we are up to, maybe more of the interested people and less of the people who where just out there for a beer. The old concept of music making, it's only in the 20th century that the concert hall became what it is today (silent, religious, dark). Mozart was not played in silent halls with arms folded, people were booing, cheering, eating drinking, it was quite a scene! Having that kind of openness in a venue, during a concert, it is a positive thing. We're not disappointed that some people decided to have a beer during some pieces, and listen during others. We did not feel that they had to watch everything with rapt attention. We're trying to provide the opportunity to hear the music. The turn out was spectacular, there were too many people there, it might have been a more musical environment if the crowds were thinner. I had to cut through the crowd, to get to Mason's rig, and talk to Mason, that was challenging to have that many people. It tends to make people bristle a bit."

As for the pieces they played, "we wanted a variety of things," he said. "The only 'old' music was the Ligeti and Webern, between 50 and 80 years old. Everything else from the last 10 years. There are so many kinds of music, so many different styles. We could not have a little bit of everything, but we went for a sampling that gave a feel for the variety. So it could have been a whole concert of minimalism, or of serial avant-garde surrealism. The Tenney was quite accessible, an easy piece to listen to, the Dennehy was an extremely avant-garde, punk-influenced piece, also both written in the last 10 years."

Punk? "Dennehy is a composer that is skating the boundary (like Mason Bates) between classical and other musics. Mason is electronica. Dennehy is influenced by punk aesthetic, in your face, extremely aggressive, underground outsider feeling about his music."

We had seen Benjamin get off the podium during his Peter and the Wolf concert, to play the bass (not to sweep Mrs Brady off her feet, as SFist Rita reported). "Oh, you went to that concert! Yeah, the bass is one of my instruments. I played the piano, the flute and the bass as a kid, and I got interested in composing and conducting came last." So we had to ask about Mason Bates' impressive bassist, MarsBassMan, who jammed on top of Mason's beats. "MarsBassMan's name is David Arend, he and Mason met at Juilliard, they play together regularly."

Did Beni say that he used to compose? "Yeah, I was for a while very active as a composer, and I decided at some points that my skills were better spent as a conductor." He did study with Stockhausen, who "is absolutely insane, I mean, he was, it's sad to hear about his passing. He was a genius. He talked of not being from this planet, of being from Sirius, and being here to bring us otherworldly music, and as outlandish and silly as that may sound, there's some truth there. He was not interested in anybody else's music, he wasn't a scholar on Beethoven, or anybody else's music, even modern music. He wrote his dissertation on Bartok's sonata for piano and percussion, but he lived in his own very unique, perplexing, dazzling world of music.As a teacher, he was incredible in explaining his own work, his technique, his tools, his tricks. His composing process was shockingly labor-intensive. there is not a note in Stockhausen's output that is haphazard, out of place, that's here for whimsical reasons. Everything is thought-out, planned out. It might sound haphazard, but it's very methodical. And he was totally nice!"

Just like you, Benjamin!