PBO to Return to the Nineteenth Century

During his tenure as Waverley Fund Music Director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) & Chorale, Nicholas McGegan has presented a generous share of historically-informed performances of music composed during the nineteenth-century. It is therefore appropriate that he should return to this repertoire as part of his farewell season. Readers probably know by now that the entire season has been given the title Reflections, and the title of next month’s subscription concert will be Romantic Reflections.

Violinist Alana Youssefian (courtesy of PBO)

It is equally appropriate that McGegan should use this concert to highlight a soloist whose talents he has contributed to cultivating. That artist is the violinist Alana Youssefian, who graduated from the Historical Performance Program at the Juilliard School in the spring of 2018. In November of that year, she made her PBO debut giving “side-by-side” performances of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi with PBO violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock. The following February she was called upon to substitute for the convalescing Rachel Barton Pine in a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 61 violin concerto in D major, easily making the leap from eighteenth-century Vivaldi to nineteenth-century Beethoven.

For next month’s program she will advance several decades further to appear as soloist in a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 violin concerto in E minor, given its first performance in 1845. The second half of the overture-concerto-symphony program that McGegan has prepared will present Franz Schubert’s D. 944 (“Great”) symphony in C major. Schubert began work on this symphony in March of 1828 and did not complete it for performance during his lifetime. The work had to wait over a decade for its premiere, primarily because the Viennese musicians objected to both its length and to technical difficulties. As a result, the first performance took place in Leipzig, rather than Vienna. However, this was an abbreviated version played by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by (wait for it) Mendelssohn on March 21, 1839. (Given the compact structuring of the Opus 64 violin concerto, it is unlikely that D. 944 had much influence on Mendelssohn’s approach to composition!)

The opening selection on the program will be the only offering to pre-date the nineteenth century. This will be the overture to Luigi Cherubini’s opera Démophoon. This opera received its first performance on December 2, 1788. Those who might be inclined to think of this as “forward-looking” music might wish to consider the opinion of Edward Joseph Dent, known for his writings about music and Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge between 1926 and 1941. Dent wrote about this particular opera, “If any work ever deserved the epithet 'classical', it is Démophoon.” (For the record, he wrote this in his book The Rise of Romantic Opera!)

The San Francisco performance of this concert will take place on Friday, March 13, beginning at 8 p.m. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, which is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices will range from $32 to $120 for premium seating. Tickets are currently available for advance purchase through a City Box Office event page, which displays a color-coded seating plan that shows which areas correspond to which price levels.