Conductor Teddy Abrams (from the event page for the concert being discussed)
Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall, Teddy Abrams led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in the final Summer with the Symphony program, which will be given a second performance this evening at 7:30 p.m. The first three of the four selections on the program were premieres in one way or another, all created by living and currently active composers. The program then concluded with Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story” suite, scored for large orchestra by Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin.
The high point of the program was the San Francisco premiere of “Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra,” which composer Mason Bates completed in 2020. Bates delivered a first-rate account of what to expect prior to the performance, and it became almost immediately apparent that he had moved on from his electronica work to take on far richer media. He also had a sense of history, being prescient enough to cite Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” as a significant predecessor, also acknowledging the “introduction to the instruments” that begins Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”
However, “Philharmonia Fantastique” is a far richer undertaking, because it involves the performance of a full symphony orchestra taking place with the screening of a highly imaginative animation, created by Jim Capobianco, that “illustrates” not only the performing instruments but also the qualities of the sounds they create. As might be expected, preparing something of so much complexity for performance did not come cheap. The making of the score involved a joint commission by not only SFS but also the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the American Youth Symphony, the Sakana Foundation, and the John & Marcia Goldman Foundation.
The animation has a protagonist, which Bates called the “sprite” in his introduction. The sprite is both a shape-shifter and a size-shifter, allowing him to present to the viewer the rich variety of instruments performing Bates’ score but also to explore them, often from the inside as well as the outside. Then, as the animation leads the eye through this rich diversity of objects, SFS presents to the ear the equally rich diversity of sonorities that these objects can summon. Thus, by the time the score goes barreling down its coda, the animation is tying all of the “contributing threads” of its imagery into a climax as rich to the eye as the instrumental ensemble is rich to the ear.
The impact of this experience could still be appreciated after the intervening intermission. That intermission was followed by the West Coast premiere of “Fractal Isles,” composed last year by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón. While she never used the word in her program notes, her final paragraph compared her score to the visual experience of a kaleidoscope, with colored pieces of glass subjected to multiple reflections, as well as reflections of those reflections. However, because her objective appeared to be to evoke experiences of Puerto Rico, her instrumental score was augmented with field recordings taken from tropical rainforests with particular attention to a small singing frog known as a coqui. Thus, while Bates’ score introduced the listener to the diversity on instrumental sonorities, Negrón took the process “to the next level” by incorporating natural sounds.
These two “image-based” compositions were framed by two narrative ones. Abrams began the program with his own music, the overture he composed for The Greatest: Muhammad Ali, which he described as “a blend of rap-opera and oratorio.” The overture drew upon the thematic content of the music that would follow. However, the attentive listener would probably not have guessed that some of that music had been composed for a long rap section. For that matter, I doubt that many in the audience would have associated any of the music with any of Ali’s fights (assuming that they had any recollections of those fights). Nevertheless, Abrams found an energetic groove for his overture that did not necessarily depend on knowledge of either prize fights or rap sessions.
On the other hand, it is likely that much of the audience was familiar with most of the music from West Side Story. The music was given a complete concert performance in Davies Symphony Hall by SFS at the conclusion of its 2012–2013 season. Abrams gave a convincing account of the excerpts collected for the “Symphonic Dances;” but, to some extent, that account had a somewhat dated quality in the context of all three of the more recent compositions on the program.
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