Enigma Variations
November 7-9
Making his San Francisco Symphony debut, Nicholas Collon leads three works with distinctive sound worlds. The cutting-edge British composer and pianist Thomas Adès composed the tragicomic, tabloidesque chamber opera Powder Her Face in 1995, when he was only 24, and assembled the suite a decade later. Despite some disappointing early performances, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky grew to value his First Concerto above all his other piano compositions, featuring it in concert tours of the United States and Europe during the final decade of his life. Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations is a grand work of musical portraiture—each movement is an impression of someone in the composer’s social circle—beginning with his wife, going through friends and colleagues, and ending with Elgar himself. And if you happen to spot a secret musical theme, a “dark saying” that goes “through and over the whole set,” you could be the first to solve the mysterious Enigma.
Nicholas Collon
Fauré’s Requiem
November 15-17
Consolation and communion are this concert's common themes. In his San Francisco Symphony debut, Kazuki Yamada leads the Orchestra and Chorus in Fauré's tenderly radiant Requiem. The five-minute Entwine, by Japanese composer Dai Fujikura, debuted in 2021, during the global pandemic. According to Dai, "I wanted to create an orchestral work where musical materials pass through from one instrument to another, like one 'hand' to another: sharing, gathering, even ending up by being a crowd. Something we have all missed since the beginning of 2020, and something we now realize is what all humans need to live to the next day.” Hailed for her sensitive and insightful interpretations, pianist Hélène Grimaud performs Ravel's sprightly Piano Concerto in G Major. In 1931, as he was finishing the concerto, Ravel explained "The music of a concerto should be lighthearted and brilliant.”
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Bernard Labadie
Labadie Conducts Mozart
November 21-23
The Canadian early-music master Bernard Labadie leads the San Francisco Symphony in an effervescent array of Mozart concert arias, capped off with his Symphony No. 39, the first of his last three symphonies. Soprano Lucy Crowe makes her SF Symphony debut with profound and passionate interpretations of Mozart's Italian- and German-language repertoire. Highlights include selections from the underrated opera seria La clemenza di Tito and the unfinished Zaide.
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