Cool?

Elim Chan speaking at Thursday’s event in City Hall (photograph by Jana Ašenbrennerová, from the Web page for the San Francisco Chronicle article)

I was not able to make it over to City Hall this past Thursday for the formal introduction of Hong Kong conductor Elim Chan as the new Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Having now read the San Francisco Chronicle account of the event, it was probably just as well. Aggravation tends to lead to apoplexy, which I try to avoid as much as possible!

Ironically, the trigger for that apoplexy resides in the Chronicle’s headline. Chan was quoted as saying: “I want to make us cool.” A chill went down my spine as I read those words, reminding me of how the very spirit of “cool” had been massacred in Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics for the musical West Side Story. This was a far cry from the twelve tracks found on the 1957 Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool (whose tracks had been recorded in 1949 and 1950). This is not the sort of music I would expect to hear in an SFS performance, although it would not surprise me if there are members of that ensemble that are perfectly comfortable with bebop and hard bop when they are in different settings!

My hope is that Chan has begun to establish a foundation for her own way of doing things (if she has not already established it). What matters most is how she will share that foundation with the SFS musicians. Fortunately, as I observed this past Thursday, I shall have my first opportunity to observe how she engages with those musicians on Friday, June 5. That program will be devoted entirely to music from the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. It goes without saying that all of those selections predate the “cool.” Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the “back-to-back” accounts of Richard Wagner and Claude Debussy!