BARS Winter Concert to Feature 2nd Guest Conductor

The Bay Area Rainbow Symphony has organized its 2018–19 season of four concerts to correlate approximately with the four seasons. Thus, the series opened with a Fall Concert on September 15, less than a week before the “official” autumnal equinox. The Winter Concert will get the jump on the first day of winter by an even greater distance, since it has been scheduled for November 10. This will be the second of the two concerts led by a guest conductor (the first having been the Fall Concert). The guest conductor next month will be Leif Bjaland.

Cellist Evan Kahn in front of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (photograph by Geo Kahn, from Evan Kahn’s Facebook Photos Web page)

If the event itself involves a loose approximation to the beginning of winter, one can say that the program is an equally loose approximation to the conventional overture-concerto-symphony format. The concerto will be Samuel Barber’s Opus 22 cello concerto in A minor, one of the many instances of American modernism composed on a commission by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). (The financing was actually due to John Nicholas Brown, a BSO trustee who also happened to be an amateur cellist.) The soloist for the BARS performance will be Evan Kahn, who played the first movement of this concerto (with piano accompaniment) at the first of the two Graduate Recitals he prepared during the last academic year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The “overture” for the program will be by Byron Adams with a composition entitled “Capriccio concertante.” The second half of the program will be the set of concert variations that Edward Elgar called “Enigma,” not a symphony but decidedly symphonic in both scope and rhetoric.

This concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, November 10. The venue will be Everett Auditorium, which is located in the Castro District. at 450 Church Street. (For those who have already made plans based on the 2018–19 season announcement, this is a change from the originally announced venue of Calvary Presbyterian Church on Fillmore Street.) General admission will be $30 with a $20 rate for seniors and a $10 charge for students. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Tix event page.