Michael Morgan conducting the Oakland East Bay Symphony in 2013 (photograph by Eoswalt, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)
Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Michael Morgan returned to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). I am somewhat embarrassed to confess that this was my first opportunity to see him conduct. However, because I keep my schedule manageable by confining myself (with very few exceptions) to the San Francisco city limits, I have yet to listen to him conduct the Oakland East Bay Symphony, where he is Music Director. Mind you, with the onset of the pandemic, Morgan was the first curator of the CURRENTS series, an exploration of the music of diverse cultures presented through the SFS streaming service SFSymphony+; but he kept a low profile in his work for that project.
Morgan’s approaches to programming can be highly imaginative. Last night he confined himself to the period from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, but the selections themselves are not encountered very often. The most familiar of those offerings came at the very beginning, the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera La gazza ladra (the thieving magpie).
Like most of Rossini’s operas, this is known by its overture and little else. The overture follows Rossini’s usual technique of lining up a series of accessible tunes and then repeating them all. However, this particular overture seizes the attention with the sort of snare drum roll that makes you wonder if you should be standing for the national anthem. However, even the snare drum roll gets repeated; and Morgan deployed two drummers, one on either side of the stage, to give the repetition the “stereophonic” effect of an echo. After that, the rest of the ensemble gets down to business; and Morgan’s scrupulous account allowed the attentive listener to relish the many comic turns in the score.
He then turned to the “Pas de six” movement in the first act of Rossini’s William Tell opera. This is a very brief interlude in a very long opera, which deploys a delightful assortment of tunes all suitable for skilled ballet dancers. Benjamin Britten liked the music so much that he appropriated some of it for his Matinées musicales suite in 1941. The music subsequently found its way back to the ballet stage when George Balanchine choreographed Britten’s version for his “Divertimento” ballet. Rossini’s original ballet music tended to follow the same repetitive practices as his overtures; but Morgan shaped his interpretation of the “Pas de six” music in a way that, again, appealed to the attentive listener.
The longest and most ambitious work on the program was Louise Farrenc’s Opus 36 (third) symphony in G minor, composed in 1847. Prior to this symphony, my only encounter with Farrenc had been her Opus 33 piano trio in E-flat major, which the Neave Trio included on their Her Voice album. The trio was completed in 1844, a time when her most inventive contemporary would have been Robert Schumann. The outstanding feature of her Opus 36 symphony was her highly imaginative approaches to instrumentation, an inventiveness that definitely sets her apart from Schumann and contemporaries such as Felix Mendelssohn. On the other hand her overall capacity for working with symphonic forms falls short of the achievements of both of these composers. Thus, once one gets beyond the innovative sonorities, one is left with a journey that meanders more than following a well-defined course from beginning to end.
If one had to maintain some degree of dutiful patience through the four movements of Farrenc’s symphony, that patience was rewarded with the final selection. This was an arrangement by Nicholas Hersh of “The Charleston,” probably the best known composition by stride pianist James P. Johnson. Hersh’s arrangement was then orchestrated for a large ensemble by David Remilis. In the midst of the generous SFS resources, there were still opportunities for several free-wheeling jazz licks, most evident in the solo work of Principal Trumpet Mark Inouye, clarinetist Jerome Simas, and Principal Trombone Tim Higgins. Morgan clearly knows his jazz (he is on the Board of the Oaktown Jazz Workshops); and he knew how to capture the spirit of the music, even when working within the more formal constraints of a full symphony orchestra.
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