Topical themes to mark S.F. season
The San Francisco Symphony’s 2018-19 season will include a two-week Stravinsky Festival conducted by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, a musical celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a program devoted to the theme of climate change in partnership with the San Francisco Asia Society.
The season, announced Monday, March 5, will open Sept. 5 with a gala concert featuring violinist Itzhak Perlman, and conclude June 27-30, 2019, with semi-staged productions of two one-act operas, Ravel’s “L’Enfant et les sortilèges” and Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde.”
Thomas will be represented as a composer by his “From the Diary of Anne Frank” and “Street Song,” and will lead the first Symphony performances of Niccolò Castiglioni’s “Inverno in-ver” (1973), with a newly created video accompaniment. He and the orchestra will open Carnegie Hall’s season in October as part of its Perspective Series, and will embark on a U.S. tour — Thomas’ last as music director — in March.
Thomas’ decision to step down at the end of the 2019-20 season focuses new attention on the guest conductors who will come to Davies Symphony Hall, on the assumption that one of them could be in a position to succeed him.
Perhaps the most noteworthy debut is that of Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, the highly
Lithuanian conductor who leads the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain. She will conduct a program of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius in January. (Last week, Grazinyte-Tyla announced that she was expecting her first child in August, but her maternity leave in Birmingham is scheduled to end in November, well in advance of her San Francisco dates.)
Other debuting conductors are Cristian Macelaru, music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, and the French conductor François-Xavier Roth. Fabio Luisi, Krzysztof Urbanski, Manfred Honeck and Daniel Harding will also make guest appearances.
But while other major American orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, have increasingly sought to diversify their offerings to include more music written by women and people of color, the San Francisco Symphony continues to lag behind in this area.
The composers represented during the 2018-19 season are, once again, exclusively white and almost exclusively male. The only works by women are short curtainraisers by the Englishborn Anna Clyne and the Polish composer and violinist Grazyna Bacewicz, who died in 1969. The orchestra’s commissioned or co-commissioned premieres are by Steven Mackey, Andrew Norman, Kevin Puts and Steve Reich.
In an interview, Executive Director Mark C. Hanson acknowledged the issue, and delivered a firm commitment that the following season would see a marked improvement.
“We are not doing enough in terms of celebrating and advocating for these underrepresented composers, whether we’re talking about women or composers from more diverse backgrounds than the typical white European male.”
But he said correcting the imbalance was a matter of lengthy and involved discussions both in-house and with guest conductors and soloists.
“I personally wish that change could happen more quickly, but this is a team effort, that requires buy-in, involve acclaimed ment and conversation with so many people, and that leads to a slower change than some of us would like.
“But I think it’s the healthiest way to assure that these ingredients that we’re adding into the programming mix really cement themselves as a part of who we are and how future programming processes are guided.”
Guest soloists making debuts during the season include cellist Johannes Moser, pianist Cédric Tiberghien and violinist Vilde Frange. The eclectic and intimate SoundBox is due to return for a fifth season, and Thomas and the orchestra plan to record works by Debussy and Berg for release on the SFS Media label.
For details of the complete 2018-19 Symphony season, go to www. sfsymphony.org