San Francisco Symphony - Your Concert 30-31

PROGRAM INFORMATION

Lina González-Granados Conducts the SF Symphony

Friday, July 30, 2021
Davies Symphony Hall

Saturday, July 31, 2021
Frost Amphitheater

THE CONCERT

Lina González-Granados conducting
San Francisco Symphony

MANUEL DE FALLA
Suite No. 1 from The Three-Cornered Hat 1919 | 10 mins
Introduction: Afternoon
Dance of the Miller's Wife (Fandango)
The Corregidor
The Grapes

ROBERT SCHUMANN
Cello Concerto in A minor, Opus 129 1850 | 26 mins
Nicht zu schnell (Not too fast)
Langsam (Slow)
Sehr lebhaft (Very lively)
Joshua Roman cello

ZOLTÁN KODÁLY
Dances of Galánta 1933 | 15 mins
Lento
Allegretto moderato
Allegro con moto, grazioso
Allegro
Allegro vivace

This program will be performed without intermission.

Lead sponsorship for the San Francisco Symphony’s concerts at Frost Amphitheater provided by The Sakurako & William Fisher Family.

ARTISTS

Lina González-Granados was most recently the recipient of the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the third prize and ECHO Special Award (European Concert Hall Orchestra Association) of La Maestra Competition, and the 2020 and 2021 Solti Foundation US Career Assistance Award. She was the winner of the Fourth Chicago Symphony Orchestra Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition, and became the new Solti Conducting Apprentice under the guidance of Riccardo Muti, beginning in February 2020 and continuing through June 2022. She has previously held positions as conducting fellow of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Seattle Symphony. Ms. González-Granados’s 2021-22 season highlights include debuts with New York Philharmonic, National Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, and Dallas Opera. These current performances mark her San Francisco Symphony debut. European debuts include appearances with the Gulbenkian Orchestra, Spanish National Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony, Kristiansand Symphony, Tapiola Sinfonietta, Polish National Radio Symphony, Orquesta del Principado de Asturias, and Tenerife Symphony. She is the founding Artistic Director of Unitas Ensemble, a chamber orchestra that performs the works of Latinx composers and provides access to free community performances for under-resourced communities. Born and raised in Cali, Colombia, Ms. González-Granados made her conducting debut in 2008 with the Youth Orchestra of Bellas Artes in Cali. She holds degrees in conducting from New England Conservatory and Boston University.

Joshua Roman is a cellist, accomplished composer, and curator whose performances embrace musical styles from Bach to Radiohead. Before setting off on his unique path as a soloist, he was the Seattle Symphony’s principal cello, a position he held for two years beginning at the age of twenty-two. He has since become renowned for his genre-bending repertoire and wide-ranging collaborations. Mr. Roman was named a TED Senior Fellow in 2015. His live performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete Six Suites for Solo Cello on TED’s Facebook page garnered 1.8M live viewers, with millions more for his Main Stage TED Talks/Performances, which included an improvisational performance with Bill T. Jones and Somi. In recent seasons, Mr. Roman performed with the Colorado, Detroit, Jacksonville, and Milwaukee symphonies; collaborated with the JACK, St. Lawrence, and Verona quartets; and performed in his own series, Town Music at Town Hall Seattle. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 2010. Joshua Roman’s adventurous spirit has led to collaborations with artists outside the music community, including creating On Grace with Anna Deavere Smith. His compositions are inspired by sources such as the poetry of Tracy K. Smith, and the musicians he writes for, such as the JACK Quartet, violinist Vadim Gluzman, and conductor David Danzmayr. Mr. Roman’s outreach endeavors have taken him to Uganda with his violin-playing siblings, where they played chamber music in schools, HIV/AIDS centers and displacement camps. For more information, visit joshuaroman.com.

The San Francisco Symphony is widely considered to be among the most artistically adventurous and innovative arts institutions in the United States, celebrated for its artistic excellence, creative performance concepts, active touring, award-winning recordings, and standard-setting education programs. In the 2020–21 season, the San Francisco Symphony welcomes conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen as its twelfth Music Director and embarks on a new vision for the present and future of the orchestral landscape. This exciting artistic future builds on the remarkable 25-year tenure of Michael Tilson Thomas as the San Francisco Symphony’s Music Director. Tilson Thomas continues his rich relationship with the Symphony as its first Music Director Laureate. In their inaugural season together, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony introduce a groundbreaking artistic leadership model anchored by eight Collaborative Partners from a variety of cultural disciplines: Nicholas Britell, Julia Bullock, Claire Chase, Bryce Dessner, Pekka Kuusisto, Nico Muhly, Carol Reiley, and Esperanza Spalding. This group of visionary artists, thinkers, and doers joins with Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony to chart a new course of experimentation by collaborating on new ideas, breaking conventional rules, and creating unique and powerful experiences. February 2021 saw the launch of SFSymphony+, the San Francisco Symphony’s on-demand video streaming service. Learn more about the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony here.

AT A GLANCE

While Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) had considered a project based on Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s 1874 novella El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) as early as 1905, it wasn’t until 1916-17 that he composed his long-simmering score and unveiled it as a staged pantomime to a scenario by María Martínez Sierra under the title El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife). The impresario Serge Diaghilev happened to be in Madrid with his Ballets Russes just then. He was captivated by El corregidor and asked Falla to expand it into a full ballet for his troupe. The 1919 premiere in London was a starry affair that brought Falla together with Ernest Ansermet as conductor, Pablo Picasso as the designer of sets and costumes, and Léonide Massine as choreographer and as one of the principal dancers. The ballet’s plot involves three principal characters in an Andalusian village: the miller and his wife (they love each other so deeply that they normally have no problem with one another’s flirtations) and an old magistrate.

For most of the 1840s, Robert Schumann (1810-56) was outwardly unhappy about his professional life. When the ’50s began, he transformed that amassed anger into intense productivity. Possessed by enormous creative energy, he completed this—his only cello concerto—in just fifteen days. In this music we glimpse the experimental side of Schumann’s temperament, especially his interest in compression and in finding new ways to connect the parts of a multi-movement piece. So successful was he in doing so here that some fellows named Johannes Brahms, Edward Elgar, and Arnold Schoenberg count among the composers to have later imitated Schumann’s inventive devices in their own music.

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) spent part of his childhood in Galánta, a small Hungarian market town that boasted a famous Roma band. Recalling those years, the composer incorporated Roma themes from those childhood songs into this piece. In the course of five movements, we are treated to various manifestations of the traditional Hungarian verbunkos style, in which swagger gives way to irresistible foot-stamping. Listen for the clarinet, who takes on the role of the single-reed tárogató in Hungarian folk music. This work, however, is no mere folk-song recital; instead, everything is filtered through the composer’s colorful brand of brilliantly orchestrated modernism.
—From notes by James M. Keller and Michael Steinberg