GUERRERO CONDUCTS CORIGLIANO & PIAZZOLLA

Adolphus Hailstork wrote An American Port of Call in 1984, inspired by the bustling seaport in his hometown of Norfolk, Virginia. He is part of a cohort of American composers who in the early 1980s began writing colorful, stylistically diverse orchestral works. Speaking about his approach to writing instrumental music, Hailstork notes, “when I do ‘pure music,’ I want to know what the piece is about, that it means something to me. That’s important.”

John Corigliano’s Triathlon is a San Francisco Symphony commission and the composer’s first concerto since 2008. The composer points out that his deep admiration for saxophonist Timothy McAllister’s “fantastic virtuosity and lyric beauty” led him to ask for “three feats of high athletic prowess,” each centered around a different member of the saxophone family: soprano, alto, and baritone, respectively.

Antonio Estévez Aponte wrote Mediodía en el Llano (Midday on the Plain) in 1942 as what was originally the middle segment of a three-movement orchestral suite. A delicate, precisely orchestrated work of musical Impressionism depicting midday on the Llano (or Llanos)—the immense grassland prairie of central Venezuela—it would be embraced as a keystone of that nation’s concert music.

Astor Piazzolla was drenched in the sounds of the Argentine tango and changed the course of that genre by enlarging its expressive palette to include gritty angularity. Studies with Alberto Ginastera, who was just then becoming the dean of Argentine composers, led to the prize-winning Sinfonía Buenos Aires of 1951, in which some of the materials of tango are transformed and incorporated into a thoroughly symphonic framework.

--After notes by Benjamin Pesetsky, James Keller, and Thomas May