Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya (from the Web page for this week’s SFS concert)
Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya made his San Francisco Symphony (SFS) debut in November of 2023 when he led the annual Día de los Muertos concert. Last night he returned to Davies Symphony Hall to give his first Orchestra Series performance. The program had a Hispanic theme with composers born on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Three of the four selections were composed in the last century, but the other enjoyed a United States premiere performance.
The composer of that new work was Jimmy López, born in Lima (Peru) in 1978 and currently composer-in-residence for both the San Diego Symphony and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. His contribution to the program was “Shift,” a four-movement concerto for trombone and orchestra with Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins as soloist. The titles of the four movements suggest that the composer may have had an interest in synesthesia:
- Sound
- Water
- Light
- Sonoluminescence
Each of these movements had its own approach to sonorities. The first required a plethora of double-tonguing episodes. The second exploited the instrument’s most powerful capability: glissando passages! The “Light” movement was performed with mute, leading into a richly extended cadenza to introduce the final movement. Higgins brought a confident command to each of these movement, making it a pity that he is on leave this season.
The program began with the most recent of the twentieth-century selections. Alberto Ginastera composed music for his Opus 8 ballet “Estancia” and then extracted four of the movements for the Opus 8a suite. The suite has little relation to the narrative for the ballet. Nevertheless, the movements were engaging; and the third of them, “Los peones de hacienda” (the cattlemen) seem to offer more than a few nods to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score, “Le sacre du printemps” (the rite of spring)!
The second half of the program was rooted in the early decades of the century. The better-known selection was the final one, Maurice Ravel’s four-movement “Rapsodie espagnole.” I am familiar enough with this music that I know the subtlety it demands, but Harth-Bedoya never seemed to invoke that spirit.
He seemed more “at home” with the preceding composition, Joaquín Turina’s three-movement “Danzas Fantásticas.” My encounters with this composer have been almost entirely through the guitar recitals I have attended and covered, so I was looking forward to listening to his command of the orchestral repertoire. Once again, however, it felt as if Harth-Bedoya was undermining the spirit that Turina had injected into his dances.
Fortunately, the impact of López’ capacity for invention made the evening worthwhile!
