The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall (from the Web page for yesterday’s performance)
Yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Youth Orchestra presented the fourth of the five programs prepared for this season. The second half of the program was particularly ambitious, devoted entirely to Gustav Maher’s fourth symphony, composed in the key of G major. In many ways this may be his most “affable” symphony, with each of the four movements having its own upbeat rhetoric. The last of these brings in a soprano, singing a text from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn extolling the virtues of “the heavenly life.”
Conductor Radu Paponiu had clearly internalized the durational scope of each of the four movements, each of which has its own story to tell. Unfortunately, in the final movement Hannah Cho’s soprano voice was too weak to hold its own against Mahler’s rich instrumentation. Mind you, Mahler himself had scaled back his resources to accommodate the soprano line. However, Cho could not rise above the ensemble to say her piece. Whether this was a problem with her own vocal strength or Paponiu’s control of dynamic levels must be left as a choice to be made by the attentive listener!
The intensity of Mahler’s symphony was balanced at the beginning of the program by Jean Sibelius’ best-known tone poem, “Finlandia.” The relationship between conductor and ensemble could not have been better. The music is a panorama of changing dispositions, and Paponiu knew who to evoke each of the moods from his attentive ensemble. Jennifer Higdon’s “blue cathedral” tone poem had its own panorama, with an opening progression recalling Aaron Copland’s rhetoric. Nevertheless, it had little to offer the attentive listener other than its overall brevity.
Taken as a whole, the program fared well through the chemistry of Paponiu’s engagement with his ensemble, making the afternoon another engaging encounter with the “next generation” of orchestral musicians.
