SFS to Showcase Collaborative Partners

Readers may recall that when it was announced that Esa-Pekka Salonen would become the next San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director as of this past September, he planned to bring a new artistic leadership model to his tenure. Key to that model was the naming of eight Collaborative Partners, representing a wide variety of cultural disciplines. Those Partners and the scopes of their respective talents are as follows:

1. pianist, film producer, and composer of award-winning film scores, Nicholas Britell
2. soprano and curator, Julia Bullock, who has made social consciousness and activism fundamental to her work
3. flutist, educator, and advocate for new and experimental music, Claire Chase
4. composer, new music curator, and member of The National, Bryce Dessner
5. violinist, musical director, and artistic trailblazer, Pekka Kuusisto
6. composer and genre-breaking collaborator, Nico Muhly
7. artificial intelligence entrepreneur and roboticist, Carol Reiley
8. jazz bassist and vocalist, esperanza spalding.

To introduce these Partners to the Bay Area community, SFS commissioned Muhly to compose a work that SFS would perform to introduce them all. The result was “Throughline,” structured as thirteen interconnected sections. Eight of the movements would feature individual partners. Most of them would provide either instrumental or vocal performance, but Reiley co-composed her movement with Muhly. In addition, each movement would highlight a small ensemble of SFS musicians.

Nico Muhly conducting “Throughline” in Davies Symphony Hall (photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Under current pandemic conditions, the performance of “Throughline” has been realized through filming and recording. The Collaborative Partners were geographically distributed as follows:

1. Britell played piano in Los Angeles.
2. Bullock sang in Munich.
3. Chase played flute in New York.
4. Dessner played guitar in Saint-Pée-sur-Nivelle (in France).
5. Kuusisto played violin in Helsinki.
6. spalding contributed bass and vocal work in northern Oregon, composing her respective movement.
7. Muhly conducted in Davies Symphony Hall.

(Reiley’s work on contributing to the score was not filmed.) In addition, Salonen was filmed in Finland.

The result will be given its first public performance as a broadcast on Public Television station KQED. It will be part of a concert program that will include four other compositions:

1. SFS percussionists will play Ellen Reid’s “Fear / Release.”
2. Kev Choice and his musicians will be joined by AÏMA the DRMR and SFS musicians in a performance of “Movements,” commissioned by SFS and released as part of the CURRENTS series.
3. The string quartet of violinists Chen Zhao and David Chernyavsky, violist David Kim, and cellist Anne Pinsker will play the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 95 string quartet in F minor.
4. Salonen will conduct seven SFS string players in a performance of the “Shaking and Trembling” movement from John Adams’ Shaker Loops.

KQED will broadcast this program, entitled Throughline: San Francisco Symphony—From Hall to Home at 7 p.m. on Saturday, November 14. The video will also be available for streaming through a Web page on the SFS Web site. That video will be available for on-demand viewing following the initial live-stream presentation. Finally, the local NBC channel will re-broadcast the concert at 7 p.m. on Monday, November 30.