New Performers for SFS 2018–19 Season

As I did last year, I shall follow up yesterday’s article about those conductors who will be making their debuts on the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) next season with an account of performers that will be making SFS debut appearances. Here, again, there will be three such soloists; but once again my effort will be truncated by one-third, the same as it was last year. That is because the SFS debut of pianist Cédric Tiberghien will take place as part of the SFS debut of conductor François-Xavier Roth, whose program was described yesterday. The other two new soloists will be as follows:

Like conductor Christian Mӑcelaru, cellist Johannes Moser will be giving a world premiere performance, this time of a cello concerto, which, again, was funded in part by SFS. The concerto was composed by Andrew Norman, whose music was last heard in Davies in November of 2016, when it was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel. Norman’s concerto will serve as the “keystone” in an overture-concerto-symphony program, which will begin with Richard Strauss’ Opus 20 tone poem “Don Juan.” The symphony for the second half of the program will be Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 100 (fifth) symphony in B-flat major. This concert will take place next January, one week after Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla makes her SFS conducting debut.

In May of 2019, Vilde Frang will make her SFS debut in a performance of Edward Elgar’s Opus 61 violin concerto in B minor. The conductor for this concert will be Krzysztof Urbański, who will permute the overture-concerto-symphony format by beginning with the Elgar concerto. Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 90 (“Italian”) symphony will conclude the program. These two works will be separated by the first SFS performances of a composition by the late Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz (who died on January 17, 1969) entitled, simply enough, “Overture.” Unless I am mistaken, this will be the first time that SFS has performed anything by Bacewicz. For that matter, I do not think I have written anything about her since 2015, the year in which Naxos released recordings of her complete string quartets; and I wrote about them for Examiner.com!