Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Jaap van Zweden led the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) in its first performance for the 2025–26 season. This was the 46th anniversary of the All San Francisco Concert, which will be followed late this afternoon with Opening Night festivities. While Opening Night is a somewhat elite affair, the All San Francisco Concert is SFS’s was of saying “Thank You” to the citizens of San Francisco as a whole; and those working for Bay Area nonprofit, social services, and grassroots organizations are offered admission for a significantly reduced fee.
Pianist Parker Van Ostrand (from the Local News Matters Web page for last night’s performance)
This year’s program was an engaging variation on the traditional overture-concerto-symphony structure. The concerto soloist was pianist Parker Van Ostrand, performing what may be the most familiar piano concerto in the repertoire, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 23, his first piano concerto in B-flat minor. The overture was firmly rooted in the Bay Area with John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine.” The intermission was followed by Ottorino Respighi’s four-movement tone poem, “Pines of Rome.”
“Short Ride” was first performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1986, but Adams is very much a major presence in the Bay Area. When Michael Tilson Thomas was Music Director, a performance in Davies was recorded on September 7, 2011 and subsequently released on an SFS Media CD, coupled with Adams’ “Harmonielehre.” I was glad to see that Amazon.com still has a Web page for this album, since it could not be more representative of Adams’ intimate relationship with SFS. Zweden had no trouble capturing and communicating the spirit of “Short Ride,” and I was glad to see that he will be returning to Davies in both January and February.
The Tchaikovsky concerto is, for many, the one concerto to rule them all. Ostrand is still a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, but he is definitely on the path to a future to be reckoned with. Mind you, he approached the opening movement with an energy that was almost Olympian. Nevertheless, he clearly had a command of everything that Tchaikovsky presented in the score. Once he got past the inevitable here-we-go-again rhetoric of the first movement, he began to settle into finding his own path to expressiveness over the course of the remainder of his performance.
Ostrand may be familiar to those with long memories of this site. He was the final solo recitalist in the 2023 San Francisco International Piano Festival. On that occasion his encore was the Alla Turca movement that concludes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 331 sonata in A major. However, what he really played was the “Concert Paraphrase on Mozart’s Turkish March,” composed by Arcadi Volodos (which I first heard performed as a Yuja Wang encore). Last night, for his first appearance with SFS, he decided it was time to play this encore again; and listening to it was as much fun as it was on my “first contact.”
As usual, the Respighi performance pulled out all the stops. That included the two brass quartets situated on either side of the choir loft above the orchestra. “Pines of Rome” also includes a nightingale in its third episode on the Janiculum Hill. Respighi had a phonograph recording prepared for that episode. (I had a high school music teacher, who argued with me that recordings had not yet been invented. He did not know that “Pines of Rome” was composed in 1924!) Respighi died in 1936, meaning that he never experienced the emergence of concrete music as a genre!
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