SF Symphony
Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco, CA 94102
Thursday, October 29 @ 7:30 PM
Special UC Berkeley Grad Student Price: $20 (you may bring one guest @ guest price)
***Pre Show Inside Music Talk with Music Director Designate Elim Chan***
Artists
Elim Chan, Conductor
Renaud Capuçon, Violin
San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Jenny Wong, Chorus Director
San Francisco Symphony
Program
Johannes Brahms, Nänie
Felix Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto
Arvo Pärt, Magnificat, First San Francisco Symphony Performances
John Adams, Doctor Atomic Symphony, First San Francisco Symphony Performances
Elim Chan conducts a quartet of works that delve into the great unknown: Choral works by Brahms and Arvo Pärt lay a meditative foundation, while Renaud Capuçon regales us with the lustrous melodies and glittering pyrotechnics of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. John Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony cloaks Nuclear Age anxiety in dark orchestral splendor.
From Music Director Designate Elim Chan
The standout element of this program is the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, which I’m really looking forward to working with. The voice has always been central to my musical life, going back to my earliest experiences growing up, and it’s a medium I’m eager to explore further in my upcoming projects here. A piece like Pärt’s Magnificat is perfect in that sense because it’s completely a cappella, which is challenging, but also allows the chorus to truly showcase what it can do. Brahms’s Nänie is a beautiful funeral song that echoes many of the sentiments found in the Doctor Atomic Symphony. While Adams’s work reflects on Oppenheimer and humanity’s capacity to destroy the world, Brahms grapples with questions of mortality and grief. The famous line, “Auch das Schöne muss sterben!” speaks to an idea that resonates deeply across both works. Nothing can escape death, and that theme runs through the outer pieces on this program. They are profound meditations on mortality. The subject matter itself and the way John addresses these moral questions are incredibly powerful. The topic remains very relevant today. You see the human struggle behind the development of something that could ultimately kill thousands of people. What I find so powerful is that when you take away the words and hear Doctor Atomic Symphony, he translates the opera into purely symphonic terms, but you still feel so much of the psychology of what he was trying to describe and underline in the original work.
“The standout element of this program is the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. The voice has always been central to my musical life and it’s a medium I’m eager to explore further in my upcoming projects here.” —Elim Chan, Music Director Designate