Thomas Wilkins Brings Americana to SFS

Conductor Thomas Wilkins (photograph by Bill Sitzmann, courtesy of SFS)

Conductor Thomas Wilkins made his San Francisco Symphony (SFS) debut in December of 2019; and his last appearance took place at the beginning of May of last year, when the concert soloist was saxophonist Branford Marsalis. Last night he led an “all-American” program featuring two compositions by George Gershwin, both enabled through a “second party.” His “Rhapsody in Blue,” originally composed for jazz ensemble, was presented in its orchestration by Ferde Grofé (a composer in his own right best known for his Grand Canyon Suite). The music from his opera Porgy and Bess was presented as the “Symphonic Picture” arranged by Robert Russell Bennett.

The other selections on the program were the first SFS performance of William Grant Still’s Wood Notes suite, and the suite arranged by Charlie Harmon of music composed by Leonard Bernstein for the musical Candide. The soloist for “Rhapsody in Blue” was Michelle Cann; and her encore was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s prelude in C-sharp minor, the second of the five piano pieces in his Opus 3 collection entitled Morceaux de fantaisie. However, Cann did not “stick to the score” very long, serving up her own plate of jazzy embellishments, possibly inspired by Charlie Parker’s appropriation of the theme in his introduction to “All the Things You Are.”

Taken as a whole, the evening was not particularly stimulating. Cann brought a fair amount of expressiveness to her Gershwin interpretation, but her jazz take on Rachmaninoff never quite registered. Wilkins’ leadership, on the other hand, tended to come across as little more than routine; and there was absolutely no sense of spirit in his take on the Candide arrangement. (Mind you, the fault here was probably that of Harmon; but, if Wilkins wanted to lead off his program with energetic Bernstein, he could have made a much better choice.)

By all rights, the Still offering should have been the high point of the evening, since it was an SFS debut. However, Wilkins seems to have had his head only in the “notes” without bringing much expressiveness to the four different evocations of woodland settings. What could have been an engaging journey through musical reflections on a sequence of natural resources (Grand Canyon Suite, anyone?) emerged as little more than a slog through one movement after another. Since this was far from my first encounter with Still’s music, my only conclusion would be that he deserved a better conductor.

This was potentially a program with an engaging diversity of “American perspectives;” but there was nothing in Wilkins’ conducting to engage the attentive listener.