March will Begin with the Second SFSYO Concert of the Season

The first Sunday in March will be another busy day, between the Hot Air Music Festival at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and three different kinds of vocal offerings distributed across the late afternoon and evening. However, those whose preferences are for the symphonic repertoire will have an equally significant alternative. Indeed, anyone who missed the stunning debut of Christian Reif in the post of Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) deserves a second chance to appreciate this conductor’s merits. That second chance will take place earlier in the afternoon with the second concert of the SFSYO season, which will give the indefatigable time to check out both Hot Air and at least one of those vocal concerts.

The program that Reif has prepared for this concert will represent the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries each with a single composition. The selections for the earlier centuries are likely to be familiar to most concertgoers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 551 (“Jupiter”) symphony in C major and Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 88 eighth symphony in G major. The twentieth-century composition has received relatively little attention recently. This will be Samuel Barber’s Opus 17, the second of three compositions he entitled “Essay for Orchestra.” This was composed in 1942, about four years after the first. (He would not compose the third until 1978.)

This concert will take place in Davies Symphony Hall, beginning at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 5. Davies Symphony Hall is located at 201 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of Grove Street. The Box Office and main entrance are on the south side of Grove Street, halfway between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. Tickets for this concert are $15 for general admission and $55 for reserved seating. Tickets may be purchased in advance online from the event page for this concert on the San Francisco Symphony Web site. Tickets may also be purchased at the Box Office or by calling 415-864-6000.