SFO Orchestra: Final Community Concert

Richard Wagner (1868 photograph of Richard Wagner by Jules Bonnet, public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Opera (SFO) Orchestra presented the second of the two community concerts to be performed in San Francisco. In contrast to the Music and Flowers program of chamber music, presented at the Minnesota Street Project, today’s program involved the entire ensemble led by its Music Director Eun Sun Kim. The program began with one of the few chamber music compositions by Richard Wagner, expanded to the resources of the string section, and concluded with an instrument-by-instrument account of the full ensemble.

The Wagner offering was “Siegfried Idyll,” scored for an ensemble of thirteen instruments: flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, two violins, viola, cello, and bass. He composed it as a birthday present for his wife, leading a performance of it on the stairs of their Tribschen villa on Christmas morning of 1870. (This was one of the more engaging episodes in Tony Palmer’s Wagner film, much of which was far less memorable!) Kim’s conducting could not have been more sensitive; and, while the venue at Saint Joseph’s Arts Society was a large one, the attentive listener could still appreciate what may have been Wagner’s most intimate undertaking.

The remainder of the program could be described as “cause and effect.” The “effect” was Benjamin Britten’s Opus 34, “The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.” This was composed for a documentary film entitled “Instruments of the Orchestra,” which introduced the viewer to both the individual instruments and also the ways those instruments were grouped into wind, brass, strings, and percussion sections. These were all presented as variations on a single theme, a Rondeau that Henry Purcell included in the incidental music he composed for the play Abdelazer by Aphra Behn. I was particularly impressed that Kim deployed the two violin sections to face each other for their interplay in Britten’s score. I was even more delighted to listen to her account of Purcell’s “source” music to prepare her audience for Britten’s theme-and-variations approach.

The program was prepared to last for only about an hour, performed without an intermission; and the finale of the Britten selection was so invigorating that I had no doubt that my time had been well spent!