Your Philistine loves modern music and crazy-sounding indie rock, but must grudgingly admit that sometimes, what we're all in the mood for is a tried-and-true bona fide Classic Of The Repertoire, a genuine Musical Warhorse -- and the SF Symphony this week obliges, with a performance of the KDFC Classical 102.1 staple Beethoven's Symphony Number 6 (the one with the Greek Gods in Walt Disney's Fantasia, no doubt illegally uploaded in the YouTube clip above.)

Whenever you go to the symphony and there's an Important Modernist Piece debuting, the audience always looks excited but slightly grim, as if bracing for the unwelcome appearance of one of those horrible sounding car-crashy "tone rows" that you have to pretend to like. Not so last night! Big smiles and relieved faces all around, even as people fidgeted and quiet-coughed their way through a formulaic (but perfectly pleasant) Haydn symphony with too many movements in it and a tone prose poem. The moral here is, people will listen to anything if they get something that was in Fantasia after the intermission!

After the jump: we actually really liked the prose poem, in part because we grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. And the French horns had kind of an off night.