One couldn’t have asked for a nicer way to open the San Diego Symphony’s summer season than with the clear skies and warm temperatures at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park on Friday evening.
Following months of overcast skies, Music Director Rafael Payare and the orchestra helped dispel the darkness with crowd-pleasers by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Leonard Bernstein, although with Rachmaninoff, a certain amount of gloom is unavoidable.
There are fans of Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances, op. 45,” but its allure always escapes me. However, the vibrancy of the San Diego Symphony’s second-half performance cannot be denied. There are plenty of woodwind and brass solos in this work, all of which were played with the utmost care and ion.
Payare oversaw a nicely detailed performance from the orchestra. In the second movement, concertmaster Jeff Thayer made the most of his solo moment. The brass and percussion sections really shined in the final movement, with the entire orchestra playing their hearts out.
The program had the theme of dances for orchestra. Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story’” opened the concert, a strong reminder of the brilliant music he conceived to Jerome Robbins’ choreography in their ground-breaking musical.
In between Bernstein and Rachmaninoff was a recent trumpet concerto by Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra, “Salseando.” Calling it a trumpet concerto is perhaps a misnomer: the soloist probably spends more time on cornets or flugelhorn than on the trumpet. As in other concertos by Sierra, “Salseando” makes extensive use of Afro-Caribbean dance rhythms.
Sierra is a bit of a compositional chameleon. Earlier compositions reflected his studies with Ligeti, composed in a more modernist but accessible style. Some later compositions are practically pastiches of Puerto Rican or 19th-century styles.
“Salseando” was generally tonal, but frequently clouded with chromaticism or whole-tone harmonies. The writing for the soloist, although strictly notated, was more improvisational, and in several places the composer allowed the soloist to ignore written-out ages and improvise.
The rhythmic momentum of the outer movements was undeniable. Syncopated grooves and swirling agework propelled the music forward. Pacho Flores was the agile trumpeter, solid in tone throughout his range, brilliant on the cornet and mellow on the flugelhorn.
He made good use of Sierra’s options for improvisations that were sympathetic to the material, except during the extended cadenza in the third movement. Here, Flores indulged in an unusual call-and-response with the audience, who happily played along.
At first, the back-and-forth consisted of Latinx musical phrases, but it soon devolved into musically inappropriate Mozart quotes (he played the first four bars of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” the audience sang back the next four). These shenanigans culminated in what Americans know as “Shave and a haircut, two bits!”
Did Flores, who is Venezuelan, know that this five-note phrase and two-note response implies a terrible profanity in many parts of Mexico, an unprintable epithet in a family newspaper? I wonder what Mexicans in the audience thought of that.
The happiest confluence of composition and performance for me was the crackling rendition of Bernstein’s “West Side Story” dance medley. Crisp ensemble work, smartly played solos, and nuanced phrasing imbued these American music theater excerpts with a grandeur worthy of any beloved European symphony.
Goodbye, June gloom! Welcome Symphony summer season!
Hertzog is a freelance writer.
