Happy 100th Birthday, San Francisco Symphony
As the audience in the classical music hall gets grayer and grayer, the San Francisco Symphony does what it can to stay ahead. But it too gets older too, turning 100 tonight. The centenarian does not look any the worse for wear though, with a year-long celebration that kicks off in high gear featuring a grand gala with virtuosos Lang Lang and Itzhak Perlman.
Any one of these guys would be more than enough to headline a season opener, but you don't turn 100 every year, so you get two shots of superstardom with your cake.
MTT, Lang-Lang and the orchestra will repeat some of the evening program tomorrow for lunch -most likely hungover from the post-concert bash so pay no heed to the blood shot eyes-, in a FREE outdoors concert in front on City Hall at noon. Lang-Lang plays the Liszt piano concerto, which totally fit his über-romantic style, and Liszt himself would be 200 years old next month. Coincidence? We think not. The orchestra will also perform Britten's Young Person Guide to the Orchestra (MTT conducting this clip!) not because you need to be introduced to the different families of instruments, but to better honor and feature the SF Symphony musicians sections by sections. After all, they're the ones making the noise.
If free music does not get you to City Hall, how about free chocolates from Ghirardelli and free pastries from La Boulange? Then follows a fantasy season where each concert brings world class soloists, and the best of new and old music. Among the events we're looking forward to? Visits by the six best orchestras in the nation (NYC, Boston, Cleveland, Philly, LA and Chicago), each for two concerts, each with a new work to launch. Top notch soloists like Joshua Bell, Christian Tetzlaff, Gil Shaham, Yuja Wang, etc. And works never heard here by composers like Thomas Ades, Mason Bates, John Adams, and plenty others.
The previous music directors will come back, too: Edo de Waart and Herbert Blomstedt. How do we know they were music directors, since MTT in the longest tenure ever, is the only one we've personally experienced? Because we read the coffee table history book published for the occasion: Music for a City, Music for the World: 100 years with the San Francisco Symphony, by Larry Rothe. It's quite an opus, as the lifetime of the symphony is tied up with events in the city and in the world: born a few years after the great quake of 1906, the symphony almost went under during the Great Depression. It was one of the first orchestra to admit women in its ranks in the 20s. Other than harpists, women harpists were more common in these days, as the harp has always been at the forefront of social struggles.
The book is full of humorous tidbits, as when the nine-year-old soloist asked to perform an encore after her piano concerto, and the conductor (Alfred Hertz at the time) told her to knock herself out, and she did, playing piece after piece after piece after piece until she had to be dragged off the stage. Or -and it's only funny in retrospect- about the time the music director, Enrique Jorda would dissert so much about the music that the orchestra would play only eighteen minutes in a three hours rehearsal. Since he had been hired over George Szell, who became a conducting legend, the laugh is on us.
The orchestra has gone a long way from these days, and if there is a drinking game associated with the book, it is to gulp a shot every time a music director is said to have brought the orchestra up to national status and recognition. You'll drink to Alfred Hertz, Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt and MTT. And it wouldn't be a bad way to celebrate the 100th birthday of our as-old-as-IBM symphony.
