In This Program
The Concert
Sunday, April 27, 2025, at 2:00pm
Musicians of the San Francisco Symphony
Giovanni Bottesini
(arr. Klaus Trumpf)
Passione amorosa (ca. 1840)
Charles Chandler bass
Bowen Ha bass
Orion Miller bass
Daniel G. Smith bass
Paul Schoenfield
Café Music (1986)
Allegro
Rubato, Andante moderato
Presto
Melissa Kleinbart violin
Amos Yang cello
John Wilson piano
Intermission
Bohuslav Martinů
Nonet (1959)
Poco Allegro
Andante
Allegretto
Blair Francis Paponiu flute
Russ de Luna oboe
Matthew Griffith clarinet
Justin Cummings bassoon
Jessica Valeri horn
Chen Zhao violin
Matthew Young viola
Davis You cello
Bowen Ha bass
Dmitri Shostakovich
String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Opus 74 (1946)
Allegretto
Moderato con moto
Allegro non troppo
Adagio
Moderato
Polina Sedukh violin
Olivia Chen violin
Leonid Plashinov-Johnson viola
Amos Yang cello
Program Notes
Passione amorosa
Giovanni Bottesini
(arr. Klaus Trumpf)
Born: December 22, 1821, in Crema, Italy
Died: July 7, 1889, in Parma, Italy
Work Composed: ca. 1840
As a child, Giovanni Bottesini played timpani in orchestras in Lombardy, studied piano, and took violin lessons from an uncle. In 1835, when he was 13, his father (a clarinetist) inquired about getting him admitted to the Milan Conservatory. The only available scholarships were for players of bassoon and double bass. Young Bottesini had never played either, but the double bass seemed not entirely foreign territory from the violin. Within a few weeks he gained enough competence on that deep-voiced instrument to snag the scholarship. When he graduated, in 1839, he received a 300-franc prize for solo playing. He put this toward purchasing a double bass built in 1716 by Carlo Giuseppe Testore, which he fitted with three strings at a time when four or five were the norm. He habitually tuned his instrument higher than normal, which gave it unaccustomed brilliance.
Within a decade, he was appearing throughout Europe and the Americas. In 1846 he headed to Havana, Cuba, to become principal double bass in the Teatro de Tacón. There he unveiled his first opera, Cristoforo Colombo. Another seven of his operas were produced during his lifetime, in Paris, Milan, Palermo, Monte Carlo, London, and Turin. He served as music director at a succession of opera houses in Sicily, Spain, and Portugal, and in 1850 he was made an honorary member of the Philharmonic Society of New York. While serving as principal double bass at a theater in Venice or Verona—accounts differ—he grew friendly with Giuseppe Verdi. In 1871, he traveled to Cairo to conduct the world premiere of Verdi’s Aïda as part of the festivities surrounding the opening of the Suez Canal. In 1889, Verdi nominated him to become director of the Parma Conservatory. Bottesini accepted the post but died only six months later.
Whereas his most famous double-bass predecessor, Domenico Dragonetti (1763–1846), had sometimes been criticized for favoring power over finesse, Bottesini elicited praise for the delicacy and agility of his playing. Exclaimed one account, “How he bewildered us by playing all sorts of melodies in flute-like harmonics, as though he had a hundred nightingales caged in his double-bass!”
Originally composed for two double basses and piano, Passione amoroso (Amorous passion) is stylistically indistinguishable from opera of the 1830s, its long-spanning lines reflecting the bel canto tradition; in fact, he may have cribbed a theme from “Mira la bianca luna,” a notturno for soprano and tenor that figures in Rossini’s collection Les soirées musicales, published in 1835.
Café Music
Paul Schoenfield
Born: January 24, 1947, in Detroit
Died: April 29, 2024, in Jerusalem
Work Composed: 1985–86
Paul Schoenfield earned a doctorate in musical arts at the age of 22 following studies at the University of Arizona. He had made his recital debut at New York’s Town Hall when he was still a teenager and had appeared as a piano soloist with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in a Young People’s Concert in 1966. He was acclaimed as a soloist, chamber music participant, and recording artist, but he gradually shifted his career emphasis from piano to composition, creating works of memorable individuality. He taught sequentially at the University of Toledo, University of Akron, and, for many years, at the University of Michigan, where he retired in 2021. In addition to music, he delved deeply into mathematics and Talmudic studies, splitting his time in later years between the United States and Jerusalem.
One is sometimes tempted to think of him as a composer-equivalent to the cartoonist R. Crumb: madcap and bizarre, but demanding to be taken seriously at the same time. A sense of finding meaning in absurdity often surfaces in his work. In his Four Parables (for piano and orchestra), for example, he dedicates each movement to “an actual life encounter.” As the inspiration for one movement, debate about whether an aged quadriplegic murderer should be released from prison sends Schoenfield’s mind scampering towards “the teleological argument of why anything exists at all, and the irreverent feeling that perhaps we are in some cosmic zoo performing inane acts for our spectators.” At the point of departure for another movement, the composer is entranced by an elderly man who slips into senility murmuring “Life is tantamount to a burlesque show.” And, speaking of burlesque, another of his pieces is titled Vaudeville (for piccolo trumpet and orchestra), and it sports such movement names as “Klezmers” and “Carmen Rivera.” Schoenfield was an eclectic, deriving inspiration from such vocabularies as jazz, ragtime, blues, African American spirituals, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Jewish traditional music; yet his pieces invariably show respect for their sources, even while turning their essence into something original.
The three movements of the virtuosic piano trio Café Music show clear connection to earlier American styles: ragtime in the opening Allegro, a syncopated blues in the Andante moderato (evolving into a meltingly beautiful, Broadway-style love ballad in the movement’s central section), a Gershwinesque cakewalk run amok in the Presto. Said Schoenfield of this irresistible trio: “The idea to compose Café Music first came to me in 1985 after sitting in one night for the pianist of the house at Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis. . . . My intention was to write a kind of high-class, dinner-music music which could be played at a restaurant, but might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall.”
Nonet
Bohuslav Martinů
Born: December 8, 1890, in Polička, Bohemia
Died: August 28, 1959, in Liestal, Switzerland
Work Composed: 1959
Bohuslav Martinů was already becoming a competent violinist when he began to compose, at the age of 10. He entered the Prague Conservatory when he was 16, but his interests, which included a passion for theater and literature, proved too broad-ranging to spell success at what was essentially a technical school. In 1910, he was expelled for—as the official record put it—“incorrigible negligence.”
By the end of World War I, which he spent as a music teacher in his Czech hometown, he had completed 120 scores. In 1923, a modest fellowship enabled him to study in Paris. “What I sought there,” he would recall, “was neither Debussy nor Impressionism nor Expressionism, but rather the true fundamentals of Western culture, which, in my opinion, harmonize much better with our own national character than a labyrinth of conjectures and problems.”
Study with Albert Roussel instilled the sense of clarity and order so esteemed among French composers. Martinů stayed in Paris for 17 years, mostly in a state of alarming indigence, earning much respect for his own compositions. Friends urged him to return to Prague, where a position at the conservatory would probably have been his for the asking at that point. But he and his wife continued west rather than east; following the Nazi invasion, they left Paris in June 1940, leading a peripatetic existence during which they often went without a roof over their heads. Eventually they made their way to New York. He hoped to return to Prague following World War II, but the imposition of a communist regime made that impractical. Following a dozen years living in the United States, he spent his final decade moving about in quest of a satisfying place to live, reaching his end in Switzerland.
Martinů composed in all imaginable genres, and his scores reflect his wide variety of interests, including jazz and Bohemian folklore. His prolific output ranges from the exceptional to the merely competent, but the quality of his late works is consistently high. The Nonet was among his last, written in early 1959, completed just seven months before his passing.
The ensemble is a winning combination—a standard wind quintet plus one each of the four orchestral string instruments—and the sound can approach that of a chamber orchestra, especially when the string textures expand with double-stops. Divertimento-style cheerfulness pervades the outer movements, the opening Poco Allegro seeming a memory of his contented Czech childhood. The Andante reaches deeper—a meditation born of advancing years—and the concluding Allegretto is a cheerful rondo, as if a village musician were leading the dance, though with the stumbling gait of unpredictably shifting meters.
String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Opus 73
Dmitri Shostakovich
Born: September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg
Died: August 9, 1975, in Moscow
Work Composed: 1946
The 15 string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich manifest the composer’s most personal expression. These works were removed from the official scrutiny that attached to his more “public” symphonies—scrutiny that often caused him trouble. In 1945, Shostakovich unleashed his Ninth Symphony, in which elation over the end of World War II reaches a level of giddiness. The commissars would have preferred something more grandiose to mark the great victory of the Soviet people. Shostakovich was spared formal censure, but the threat of condemnation caused him deep anxiety.
He plunged forward into his Third String Quartet, making good progress on it in the winter of 1946 and then setting it aside for several months before returning to complete it that summer. He was composing it expressly for the Beethoven String Quartet, with whose members Shostakovich had been friendly for two decades. “It seems to me that I have never been so pleased with one of my works as with this quartet,” Shostakovich wrote to Sergei Shirinsky, the group’s cellist.
The composer initially placed descriptive headings at the beginning of each movement: “Calm unawareness of the future cataclysm,” for the first, “Rumblings of unrest and anticipation” for the second, “The forces of war are unleashed” for the third, “Homage to the Dead” for the Adagio, and, at the end, “Why, and for what?” No explanation is recorded for his decision to delete those headings, but they don’t appear in the published score.
If the Third Quartet was meant to suggest a narrative, the plot is in no way clear. Much of the piece comes across as parodistic: Is the opening really as insouciant as it seems? Is a waltz just a waltz, and is a march just a march? What are we to make of the central section of the second movement, where the four instruments play in such quiet staccato that often the music seems scarcely to be there at all? Violent argument sometimes enters the discourse (as in the third movement), and at points it reaches the realm of personal anguish and (in the great Adagio) funereal tragedy.
The violist Fyodor Druzhinin, who joined the Beethoven Quartet in 1964, left a moving reminiscence involving this piece: “When we finished playing he sat quite still in silence like a wounded bird, tears streaming down his face. This was the only time that I saw Shostakovich so open and defenseless.”
—James M. Keller
About the Artists
Charles Chandler joined the San Francisco Symphony bass section in 1992, becoming the first alum of the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra to become a member. He has also performed at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and served as associate principal bass of the Phoenix Symphony. He studied with Shinji Eshima and with David Walter at the Juilliard School.
Bowen Ha joined the San Francisco Symphony bass section at the beginning of the 2024–25 season. He studied at the Juilliard School and has appeared as a substitute musician with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Indianapolis Symphony.
Orion Miller joined the San Francisco Symphony bass section at the beginning of the 2024–25 season. He previously performed with the London Symphony as a Keston Max Fellow and as a substitute musician with the Houston Symphony. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.
Daniel G. Smith was appointed Associate Principal Bass of the San Francisco Symphony in 2017 and holds the Lawrence Metcalf Second Century Chair. He previously served as principal bass of the Santa Barbara Symphony, and he was a member of the San Diego Symphony. He received his Bachelor of Music from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
Melissa Kleinbart joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1998 and holds the Katharine Hanrahan Chair. She was previously associate concertmaster with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and assistant concertmaster with the Vancouver Symphony. She has made solo appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony, and New York Symphonic Ensemble, and is a graduate of the Juilliard School.
Amos Yang joined the San Francisco Symphony in 2007 as Assistant Principal Cello and holds the Karel & Lida Urbanek Chair. He was previously a member of the Seattle Symphony and a member of the Maia String Quartet. Born and raised in San Francisco, he was a member of the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra and San Francisco Boys Choir, and is a graduate of the Juilliard School.
John Wilson frequently performs as a pianist with the San Francisco Symphony and serves as principal keyboard for the Marin Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and Oakland Symphony. He performed on the Grammy Award–winning recording of Michael Tilson Thomas’s Meditations on Rilke as well as on the recent release of Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas on Pentatone.
Blair Francis Paponiu joined the San Francisco Symphony as Associate Principal Flute, holding the Catherine & Russell Clark Chair, at the beginning of the 2023–24 season. She was previously assistant principal and second flute with the Naples Philharmonic in Florida and performed with the New York Philharmonic for two seasons. Learn more about about Paponiu in our April feature.
Russ de Luna joined the San Francisco Symphony as English Horn in 2007 and holds the Joseph & Pauline Scafidi Chair. He recently appeared as soloist with the Orchestra in the US premiere of Outi Tarkiainen’s Milky Ways, and is a graduate of Boston University and Northwestern University.
Matthew Griffith joined the San Francisco Symphony as Associate Principal and E-flat Clarinet at the beginning of the 2022–23 season. He previously served as acting assistant principal clarinet with the North Carolina Symphony and the Nashville Symphony and was a member of TŌN (The Orchestra Now), a graduate-level training orchestra based at Bard College.
Jessica Valeri joined the San Francisco Symphony horn section in 2008. Prior to her appointment, she was a member of the St. Louis Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Grant Park Orchestra, and Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra.
Justin Cummings joined the San Francisco Symphony bassoon section at the beginning of the 2023–24 season. He was previously principal bassoon of the Knoxville Symphony and a fellow of the New World Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. He is an alumnus of the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Chen Zhao joined the San Francisco Symphony second violin section in 2000 after being a member of the New World Symphony. He studied at the Shanghai Conservatory, Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Curtis Institute of Music, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he is now a violin professor.
Matthew Young joined the San Francisco Symphony viola section in 2012. He was a founding member of the Verklärte Quartet, which won grand prize in the 2003 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, and currently performs as a member of Ensemble San Francisco. He attended the University of Kentucky, Yale School of Music, and Cleveland Institute of Music.
Davis You joined the San Francisco Symphony cello section at the beginning of the 2024–25 season and holds the Lyman & Carol Casey Second Century Chair. He recently received his bachelor of music from New England Conservatory, and was a member of Quartet Luminera, which won the silver medal at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. A Bay Area native, he began his cello studies with Irene Sharp and Jonathan Koh.
Polina Sedukh, a native of Saint Petersburg, Russia, joined the San Francisco Symphony in 2007. She was previously a member of the Boston Symphony and made her solo debut with the Chamber Orchestra of Liepaya in Latvia at the age of seven, followed by recital tours in the United States, Germany, and Austria.
Olivia Chen joined the San Francisco Symphony at the beginning of the 2023–24 season and is Acting Assistant Principal Second Violin. She was a Tanglewood fellow for two summers, serving as concertmaster of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. She has also performed with the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and with the Baltimore Symphony. She pursued her undergraduate studies at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
Leonid Plashinov-Johnson joined the San Francisco Symphony viola section in 2022. Previously a member of the St. Louis Symphony, he is a laureate of multiple competitions, most recently the Primrose International Viola Competition, and has participated in the Yellow Barn, Ravinia, and AIMS festivals. Born in Russia, he graduated from New England Conservatory, where he won the concerto competition.
