The Champagne and evening wear had all been cleared away, but the rhymes were still flowing in Davies Symphony Hall 24 hours after the San Francisco Symphony’sseason-opening gala.
Or rather, they were flowing again,as two Bay Area luminaries, Oakland hip-hop artistKev Choiceand San Francisco freestyle artist Anthony “Two-Touch” Veneziale, returned to the stage Saturday, Sept. 23, to join Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and the orchestra in a reprise of Swedish composer Anders Hillborg’s puckish genre-bender “Rap Notes.”
有时是三藩市音乐会,the Symphony’s annual replay of its opening-night program as an invitational event for nearly 100 Bay Area nonprofits, social services groups and community organizations.
The repertoire was the same, including familiar showpieces by Strauss, Mahler and Ravel. The spirit of the occasion, though, was notably less glittery and more casual — an opportunity for the orchestra to reach out to music-lovers who aren’t necessarily into swanky outfits and elaborate canapes (as well as anyone who’d spent the previous evening on the other side of Grove Street at the San Francisco Opera’s opening of “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs”).
The All-San Francisco Concert has been a fixture of the Symphony’s opening weekend celebrations since Davies first opened its doors in 1980. Presented in partnership with the San Francisco Arts Commission, the concert celebrates the multitude of entities across the region doing valuable work for underserved segments of the community. That includes Youth Art Exchange, a program that brings the arts into San Francisco’s public high schools. The organization was this year’s recipient of the Ellen Magnin Newman Award, a recognition of an organization that “strengthens the region’s cultural fabric.”
Hillborg’s fluid blend of orchestral music and hip-hop certainly felt responsive to that mission. “Rap Notes” offers an uncluttered musical canvas, basically a full-orchestra rhythm track, against which the two soloists held forth in a dazzling whirl of impromptu rhyming.
In true improvisatory spirit, the duo solicited a word from the audience as a basis for some of the performance. Saturday’s audience came up with “chat,” a somewhat less inspirational choice than Friday’s “hope,” “peace” and “love.”
And as a comic counterpoint to this stylistic hybrid, Hillborg adds an operatic soprano into the mix — in this case the great Hila Plitmann — to come onstage at midpoint and deliver the vocal pyrotechnics of the Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”
As if that weren’t enough artistic fusion, the Symphony also added a visual and technological layer with a series of video projections throughout the program.
For the Hillborg piece, that simply meant a computer scrambling to transcribe the rappers’ flow in real time, a task for which the software was woefully ill-equipped. (At one point Veneziale let loose with an all-too-accurate taunt, “Can AI keep up with us? No.”) The remainder of the concert was accompanied by ghoulishly kitschycomputer-generated visual imagery.
In other respects, the evening was a more traditional musical offering, for better or worse.
There was a robust performance of Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer” by the British baritone Simon Keenlyside, and the evening concluded with a dull, laggardly account of Ravel’s “Boléro,” in which principal percussionistJacob Nisslymade a valiant effort to persuade his colleagues that any of it mattered.
For sheer orchestral splendor, though — and for a hint of the pleasures to come in the new season — it would be hard to top the opening rendition of Strauss‚ tone poem “Don Juan,” which burst out of the gate on a stream of adrenaline and maintained it right through to the final moments. More like this, please!
Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com