Last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (BARS) presented its Pride Concert as a contribution to the San Francisco Pride Celebration. The entire program was structured around two symphonies, both by composers whose last names began with the letter “B.” The first half of the program presented Johannes Brahms Opus 73 in D major, the second of his four symphonies. The intermission was then followed by Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony, composed for orchestra and solo piano and given the title “The Age of Anxiety,” inspired by the poem of the same title by W. H. Auden. The “overture” for this occasion was “Soul of Remembrance,” the second of the five Movements in Color compositions by Mary Watkins. The conductor for the evening was Music Director Dawn Harms, who also served as the ensemble’s interlocutor.
BARS is a community orchestra, meaning that its members convene for the joy of making music, rather than for earning a viable salary. Usually a community is defined geographically; but, where BARS is concerned, it is one of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identified (LGBTQ+) musicians that share the goal of excellence in the performing arts. As performers, they take their music seriously; but that is not necessarily their highest priority.
It is important to bear this context in mind, because the Brahms Opus 73 is a rather challenging undertaking. Thus, last night’s fully attentive listener probably encountered shortcomings of intonation or the overall blend. Nevertheless, Harms clearly knows how to coax out the best that the group can manage, which amounts to no end of moments that will both engage and delight the attentive listener. Furthermore, last night there was a sense that every performer harbored an appreciation for what Brahms created that is realized through love, if not downright passion. This is an ensemble that clearly wanted to do right by Brahms, and it is hard to imagine his ghost being dissatisfied with the results.
The Bernstein symphony is a tougher nut to crack. In the first place, the poem that supposedly inspired it is definitely not for casual reading. It begins with four people in a bar, all wallowing in discontent. They then find themselves on a small island, pairing off to traverse it in different directions. How they get from the bar to the island is left as an exercise for the reader, but they then return to where one of the four of them lives, where there is (at least?) one erotic coupling.
Bernstein’s score is in two parts, each with labels of sections that (at least roughly) parallel the episodes in Auden’s poem. However, any rhetorical connection between poem and orchestra never seems to concern the composer. Of greater interest to him is a part for solo piano (performed last night by Sara Davis Buechner), which traverses a variety of styles in a manner similar to the traversal of the island in Auden’s poem. Most engaging is the moment in which the piano part lets loose with thoroughly down-and-dirty jazzy rhetoric, and Buechner was definitely at the top of her game during that episode. Thus, as the music drew to its conclusion, the attentive listener could feel some satisfaction with the journey, even if it was unclear just where that journey went.
Buechner then returned for an encore. She played “Do, Do, Do,” which George Gershwin composed for the musical Oh, Kay! Most likely she used the solo piano arrangement in George Gershwin’s Songbook. However, I am pretty certain that, for all of the florid embellishments found in that piano version, Buechner had a few of her own to add to the mix. The high spirits of that encore effectively complemented the darkness of “Soul of Remembrance,” which opened the program, making for a fully satisfying journey of dispositions over the course of the evening.
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