In This Program
Thursday, April 10, 2025, at 7:30pm
Friday, April 11, 2025, at 7:30pm
Saturday, April 12, 2025, at 7:30pm
Marin Alsop conducting
Gabriela Ortiz
Antrópolis (2018)
Gabriela Montero
Piano Concerto No. 1, Latin (2016)
Mambo
Andante moderato
Allegro venezolano
First San Francisco Symphony Performances
Gabriela Montero
Intermission
Aaron Copland
Fanfare for the Common Man (1942)
Joan Tower
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1 (1986)
Samuel Barber
Symphony No. 1, Opus 9 (1936)
Allegro ma non troppo–Allegro molto–Andante tranquillo–Con moto
Marin Alsop’s appearance is supported by the Louise M. Davies Guest Conductor Fund.
These concerts are generously supported by the Ralph I. Dorfman Commissioning Fund.
Program Notes
At a Glance
On the second half of the program, two paired fanfares by American composers Aaron Copland and Joan Tower celebrate the common man and the uncommon woman, followed by Samuel Barber’s primal single-movement Symphony No. 1.
Antrópolis
Gabriela Ortiz
Born: December 20, 1964, in Mexico City
Work Composed: 2018 (rev. 2019)
SF Symphony Performances: First and only—November 2024. Carlos Miguel Prieto conducted.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (cymbals, suspended cymbal, cowbell, almglocken, claves, maracas, guiro, metal guiro, vibraslap, whip, snare drum, bongo drums, bass drum, trap set, tin cans, glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone, and marimba), and strings
Duration: About 10 minutes
Gabriela Ortiz was born into music—her parents performed in an ensemble committed to preserving Mexico’s folk traditions. After earning a PhD in electroacoustic composition from the City University in London, she returned to Mexico City, where she has taught at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México since 2000. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, in 2019 was admitted into the Academía de Artes, and in 2022 became the first woman composer inducted into the Colegio Nacional. This season she holds the composer’s chair at Carnegie Hall.
In an interview with Tom Moore of Opera Today, she explained: “When I compose, I am not trying to sound Mexican. . . . It is like an inner force that is just there, and I have to express that in sound. It probably has a Mexican identity, because it’s me, I live in Mexico, and I like my country.” This is often reflected in her vibrant treatment of rhythm; there’s no mistaking it in Antrópolis, a piece that keeps constantly on the move. “The word antro,” she says, “has its origin in the Latin antrum, meaning ‘grotto’ or ‘cavern.’ In Mexico, until the ’90s, the term referred to bars or entertainment places of dubious reputation. But nowadays, and especially among younger people, this word refers to any bar or nightclub.” She explains how Antrópolis came into being:
Antrópolis, a neologism, [is] a precise invented name for a piece that narrates the sound of the city through its dance halls and nightclubs. It is a piece in which I wanted to pay a very personal tribute to some of those antros or emblematic dance halls of Mexico City that left a special sonorous imprint in my memory. These cabarets or dance halls represent the nostalgia for rumberas and live dance orchestras, such as El Bombay, where it is said that Che Guevara would twirl, or the Salón Colonia, which seems to have come out of dreams taken from a film of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. . . . Finally, the memory of the bar Tutti Frutti leaves an impression, where I first met the punk couple who own the antro, and where you could listen to experimental music from the 1980s.
Piano Concerto No. 1, Latin
Gabriela Montero
Born: May 10, 1970, in Caracas, Venezuela
Work Composed: 2016
First SF Symphony Performances
Instrumentation: solo piano, 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion (triangle, crash cymbals, high-hat, tam-tam, cowbells, claves, maracas, guiro, egg shakers, woodblocks, tambourine, bongo drums, congas, tom-toms, rototoms, brake drum, and marimba), harp, and strings
Duration: About 35 minutes
Gabriela Montero began formal piano lessons at the age of four in her native Venezuela and appeared as a concerto soloist when she was eight. She went to conservatory at London’s Royal Academy of Music and in 1995 won third prize in the International Chopin Piano Competition. She has gone on to a distinguished career as a pianist. When performing in recital, she often enhances her programs by improvising on themes submitted by the audience, much as keyboard giants like Mozart and Beethoven did in earlier times.
Improvising is essentially “composing on the spot,” and it was not surprising that she should expand her work to include composing in a more permanent fashion. In 2011 she wrote Ex Patria for piano and orchestra (to honor the 19,336 victims of homicide that year in Venezuela), with her Latin Piano Concerto following in 2016, and Canaima: A Quintet for Piano and Strings in 2024. The last of these was premiered at the ceremony where she received the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, one of several humanitarian awards she has been given. Much of her work as a musician is politically charged. She is inspired by an altruistic impulse and by fury directed at the leaders of her native country—Hugo Chávez, who was president from 1999 until his death in 2013, and then Nicolás Maduro, who has commanded the country since then. “My stance is one against the violence and the corruption that have taken over Venezuela,” she said, “and I want to try and make the world a little bit more aware of what we are enduring.” She says:
In a process of musical osmosis—a natural consequence of the globalized, interconnected world in which we now live—my Piano Concerto No. 1, the Latin Concerto, honors the musical traditions that have shaped me, while inviting the cultural idioms of my native continent to the concert halls of Europe and the wider world. European formalism and the informality of Latin-America’s rich, rhythmical identity merge in a complementary dance of both the joyful and macabre. Writing my concerto, I set out to describe the complex and often contradictory character of Latin America, from the rhythmically exuberant to the forebodingly demonic. . . . For every suggestion of surface celebration, in the first-movement Mambo, for instance, there are undercurrents of disruption. The third-movement Allegro venezolano, which cites the well-known Venezuelan tune “Pajarillo,” is interrupted at times by the dark arts of black magic—a symbolic reminder of the malevolent forces that, too often, hold our continent hostage to tyranny in its multiple guises.
Fanfare for the Common Man
Aaron Copland
Born: November 14, 1900, in New York
Died: December 2, 1990, in Peekskill, New York
Work Composed: 1942
SF Symphony Performances: First—July 1972. Arthur Fiedler conducted. Most recent—March 2022. Bradley Hogarth conducted.
Instrumentation: 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and percussion (bass drum and tam-tam)
Duration: About 3 minutes
In 1941, conductor Eugene Goossens instigated a commissioning project at the Cincinnati Symphony to generate patriotic fervor. He asked 18 composers to write fanfares for brass and percussion. “It is my idea,” Goossens said, “to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.”
The Cincinnati Symphony included one as the opening item on each of its concerts during the 1942–43 season, with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man being premiered on March 12, 1943.
After considering several different themes, Copland settled on a title that was at once general and specific. “It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army,” he later explained. “He deserved a fanfare.” Its memorable contours became instantly popular: stark trumpets proclaiming a proud, unhurried theme born of optimistically rising intervals, leisurely expanding from a unison statement to two-part harmony divided between the trumpet and horn sections, and then to the fully harmonized texture of the entire brass section.
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1
Joan Tower
Born: September 6, 1938, in New Rochelle, New York
Work Composed: 1986
SF Symphony Performances: First and only—December 2019. Edwin Outwater conducted.
Instrumentation: 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and percussion (snare drum, medium bass drum, cymbals, high and medium gong, tam-tam, tom-toms, large bass drum, temple blocks, and triangle)
Duration: About 3 minutes
Joan Tower was born into a family of ancient New England lineage, but when she was nine the family moved to La Paz, Bolivia, high in the Andes, where her father worked as a manager of tin mines. She returned to the United States at the age of 18 to study at Bennington College and later Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition. She cofounded the Da Capo Chamber Players in 1969 and served as its pianist for 15 years. In 1972 she began teaching music at Bard College, where she remains on the faculty more than a half-century later. She has received many honors, including the Grawemeyer Award and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award, and was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 2019.
Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman has become a modern classic since it was introduced on January 10, 1987, with Hans Vonk conducting the Houston Symphony. In fact, it spawned a whole series of similarly named pieces—six so far, each dedicated to a woman of note—No. 1 being dedicated to none other than Marin Alsop.
In an interview with Abby White for BMI’s MusicWorld, Tower elaborated about the genesis of the piece:
I was reading a lot of feminist books . . . and then the Houston Symphony came along and said, “we’d like you to write a fanfare.” And I said, “OK, a fanfare, what the hell is a fanfare? . . . I started thinking about Copland and the only fanfare I knew, Fanfare for the Common Man, and the title really bothered me. For the “common man”? What the hell is that? It’s kind of elitist. So, I had to turn that one around.
Symphony No. 1, Opus 9
Samuel Barber
Born: March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania
Died: January 23, 1981, in New York
Work Composed: 1935–36 (rev. 1943)
SF Symphony Performances: First—January 1963. Howard Mitchell conducted. Most recent—April 2019. James Gaffigan conducted.
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum and cymbals), harp, and strings
Duration: About 20 minutes
Having graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Samuel Barber won two awards in quick succession in May 1935: a Pulitzer traveling scholarship and the Prix de Rome. That October he left for the two-year residency in Rome and from there he undertook journeys elsewhere in Europe.
The Rome Prize covered Barber’s needs from 1935–37, and during that span he completed, among other pieces, his First Symphony (in One Movement), as it is identified on its title page. In April 1936, he played it for conductor Bernardino Molinari, who on December 13 conducted its premiere with his Augusteo Orchestra in Rome. It met with little success there; Barber later reported that the Italian critics found it “too dark-toned, too Nordic, too Sibelian.” (Later commentators have viewed Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7, which also compresses four movements into a single span, as a direct ancestor.) Nonetheless, the symphony quickly received further high-profile performances by the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and London Symphony, and it was featured in the Vienna Philharmonic’s opening concert of the 1937 Salzburg Festival.
For the New York premiere, which was conducted by Artur Rodzinski on March 24, 1937, Barber described the work as "a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony. . . based on the three themes of the initial Allegro ma non troppo, which retain throughout the work their fundamental character.”
This is a serious and impressive entry into the catalogue of the young composer, who was developing rapidly. During the winter of 1942–43, Barber thought through his score again and subjected his symphony to considerable revision, replacing his original scherzo section with a new one and lightening the texture in passages throughout. This yielded the standard form that is heard today.
—James M. Keller
About the Artists
Marin Alsop
This season marks Marin Alsop’s sixth as chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony, which she leads at Vienna’s Musikverein and Konzerthaus; her second as artistic director and chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony; her second as principal guest conductor of London’s Philharmonia; and her first as principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She is also chief conductor of the Ravinia Festival, where she leads the Chicago Symphony’s annual summer residencies, is director of graduate conducting at Johns Hopkins’s Peabody Institute, founder of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, and is the first music director of the National Orchestral Institute and Festival at the University of Maryland.
In 2021, Alsop became music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony, which she continues to conduct each season. In 2019, after seven years as music director of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony, Alsop was named “conductor of honour,” and continues to undertake major projects there each season. Deeply committed to new music, she was music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years, leading 174 premieres.
Recognized with Grammy, Classical BRIT, and Gramophone awards, Alsop’s discography comprises more than 200 titles. The first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Alsop has also been honored with the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award and honorary doctorates from Yale University and the Juilliard School. She makes her San Francisco Symphony subscription series debut with this program.
Gabriela Montero
Gabriela Montero’s recent and upcoming highlights include performances of her Latin Concerto with the New World Symphony, Vienna Radio Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony, Antwerp Symphony, Swedish Radio Symphony. Other appearances have included the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Houston Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, among many other groups. In January 2009, she was a featured performer at Barack Obama’s inauguration, and she made her San Francisco Symphony debut the following July.
Montero’s most recent album, released on Orchid Classics, features her Latin Concerto and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major. Her first orchestral composition, Ex Patria, won a Latin Grammy for Best Classical Album, and in 2008, she also received a Grammy nomination for her album Baroque.
