San Francisco Symphony: One Up, One Down

Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero (courtesy of SFS)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall hosted the first of the two concerts presenting the final San Francisco Symphony (SFS) program of the month. The ensemble was led by Giancarlo Guerrero, who made his Orchestral Series debut in April of last year. Guerrero, who is Music Director of both the Nashville Symphony and the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic in Poland, is an intensely energetic conductor, who throws both his entire body and a plethora of facial expressions into leading an ensemble. HIs program consisted of two 45-minute compositions, one from the late nineteenth century by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and the other a West Coast premiere of Her Story, a composition by Julia Wolfe co-commissioned by SFS, along with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Nashville Symphony.

The Rimsky-Korsakov selection was his Opus 35 symphonic suite entitled Scheherazade, based on the stories found in the One Thousand and One Nights collection of Middle Eastern folk tales. His command of the full complement of instruments in an orchestra was so thorough that he wrote the book on it, Principles of Orchestration. (He died before finishing the book, but Maximilian Steinberg spent about four years working it into the complete account it deserved.) Guerrero clearly appreciated the abundance of sonorous devices that emerged from Rimsky-Korsakov’s command of orchestration, and he made all of those devices clear to any member of the Davies audience willing to sit up and listen. In the midst of that sonorous abundance, Assistant Concertmaster Wyatt Underhill stood out with a plethora of solo passages depicting Scheherazade herself narrating those folk tales.

Her Story, on the other hand, was about as far away from narrative as one could recognize. Wolfe prepared her own libretto for her two-movement composition. The first movement text was taken from a letter that Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John in 1776. The key sentence is a powerful one: “I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and more favorable than your ancestors.” Looking back on that year in which the colonies declared independence from the British Empire, the futility of Abigail’s undertaking is sadly depressing. Even more depressing, however, was the text for the second movement, which was little more than agitprop babble.

I have been following Wolfe’s “agenda music” since June of 2014, when I wrote a piece for Examiner.com about her Steel Hammer album. This was a product of an intense analysis of the “John Henry” ballad that resulted in a one-hour oratorio that was not particularly different from Her Story. My conclusion about Steel Hammer was that she had much to say during the first ten minutes, followed by 50 minutes of “more of the same.” Almost a decade has passed since then, and Wolfe still has not yet figured out how to get beyond “more of the same.”