San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Warm music a perfect coda to cool evening
There was a bit of a chill in the air the other Saturday, a November hint that the year is sliding to its end. It was time, we thought, for a classy night on the town.
The Sailor Girl, my companion in city adventures, had scored tickets to the Symphony. Box seats, too. And why not? It has been a bit of a disappointing year, full of promise not quite kept. We are still wearing masks, still showing our vaccination cards, still worrying. But the city is almost back, despite everything. We thought we’d check. We had dinner in Hayes Valley. The lights had dimmed in the neighborhood during the pandemic, but on a Symphony Saturday, it was crowded and the restaurants all looked full; outside heaters flared like torches in sidewalk parklet places, a reminder that winter is still a way off.
We went to the Hayes Street Grill, a favorite for a preconcert dinner: white tablecloths, waiters all in black, stylish in an older San Francisco way. It had been closed for more than a year during the pandemic, but reopened in midsummer.
It seemed as if the place had never been away, a good Saturday night crowd. We gave the Tomales Bay oysters and the Half Moon Bay petrale sole a vote of confidence, and even lingered for dessert. Davies Symphony Hall is not far away, just down the block and around the corner. I’ve always liked Davies — glass and glitter on the outside. It’s like a twoway mirror, so that drivers and Muni bus riders on Van Ness Avenue can see concert patrons in the lobby. People in the lobby can see out at the City Hall dome, lit up that night in an autumnal purple, and the traffic streaming by on Van Ness. There was a new sight, too, just across the avenue, the 12-story Conservatory of Music’s Bowes Center for the Performing Arts. It gave a new feel to that part of Van Ness where a giant construction project has been going on for years.
We were early. A chance to hang out for a bit in the lobby. It seemed to be a Champagne kind of night. We split a glass and watched the passing parade.
San Francisco used to be a dressy kind of place, but style seems to have gone out of style these days. About half of the people dressed as if they were going to the
San Francisco Symphony. The other half dressed for a garage sale: jeans and puff coats. It wasn’t just the younger folks. The older people, who should have known better, were worse, and the scruffy men were worst of all. But that battle was lost many seasons ago.
But never mind that. We’d come for the music. It was an American program of three pieces. First was “Patterns,” a 1960 composition by William Grant Still, who is often called the dean of African American composers. An intricate piece I’d never heard before.
The second was the Concerto for Trombone, composed by Timothy Higgins, the Symphony’s principal trombonist. Higgins himself was the soloist. It was the newest of new music — the world premiere had been in the same hall only two days before. Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman called the piece “a buoyant, imaginative creation.” Higgins’ performance, Kosman said, made him “the hero of the evening.”
But we had come to hear Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” that premier piece of American music conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. He is the closest thing to a musical superstar that we have in the city. He was the music director of the San Francisco Symphony for 25 years. He stepped away at the end of the 2020 season and then had health problems. He was operated on for a brain tumor over the summer.
He was back again that night, in a sense a reminder of the way the city is back from the pandemic. Ludovic Morlot led the orchestra for the first two pieces, and after the intermission Thomas walked to the podium, a bit stiffly. You
The lobby of Davies Symphony Hall offers a view of San Francisco City Hall, lit up in autumnal purple, as well as traffic streaming by on Van Ness Avenue.
could see he was not the young man he once was. The audience rose and applauded.
Thomas is one of the great interpreters of Copland’s music, and “Appalachian Spring” is Copland’s most famous work. We sat back and let the music wash over us.
It was beautiful, it was lush, it was very American. I watched Thomas: He held the baton in his right hand and moved the fingers of his left hand, as if to pull the sound out of the orchestra. At the very end he
closed his hand in a fist.
The audience was glad to see him, glad to hear him. He got standing ovations.
We left, full of music and good cheer. The Symphony audience is older than the rest of San Francisco, but on the sidewalk there was a string quintet of young musicians, bound up in coats and scarves against the autumn chill.
They were playing Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” a tune familiar to anyone who ever took a music appreciation course in school.
A little night music on the corner of Grove and Franklin streets. A nice end to a classic night on the town.