The San Francisco Conservatory of Music made waves in 2020 when it acquired the management company Opus 3 Artists in an unprecedented merger of music education and music business.
Revenue raised by the subsidiary for-profit entity (and by two additional companies the school has purchased since) could potentially benefit the Conservatory in a big way. And the students? They’re given “extraordinary experiences,” said SFCM president David H. Stull onstage at Davies Symphony Hall on Wednesday, Feb. 26.
That evening, one student got the chance of a lifetime. Performing J.S. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, soloist Fiona Cunninghame-Murray shared the spotlight with violinist Joshua Bell and his orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. She even got to play on a Strad for the occasion.
In this piece, neither soloist is above the other. Lines weave equitably through the two parts. The first violin gets a primed audience, but the second violin gets to play first.
Most striking about this performance was how the shared material transformed as it changed hands. In the same part of the bow, Bell was soft and silvery while Cunninghame-Murray sounded impassioned, with wilder offbeats and, in the finale, extra fire to her second fiddle. ASMF (which Opus 3 manages) ambled sweetly in the middle movement’s pastorale, whose simple lines have inspired generations of aspiring violinists and won over as many listeners.
Events like this do tend to require that musicians dust off the classical hits. The San Francisco Symphony listed the concert under its Great Performers Series, but the Conservatory’s website billed the evening as a dinner-and-reception package to benefit the school’s scholarship programs.
The headlining work was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a virtuosically orchestrated suite and a sizable undertaking for a peer-led ensemble. Bell, ASMF’s music director since 2011, gestured from the conductor’s desk when he wasn’t playing the piece’s cadenzas. For music intended to personify the character of Scheherazade, the desperate bride of legend in the Arabian Nights, these solos during Wednesday’s performance bordered on casual.
But this was nonetheless a remarkable concert — joining ASMF’s ranks for the piece was a cohort of SFCM students sitting side by side with the professionals. As might be expected of a partnership spanning only a few rehearsals, the performance couldn’t help but sound like two groups coming together. The first movement’s chords didn’t always agree, and the orchestral balance was off, with too much brass and not enough lower strings in the open-voiced arpeggios that represent the sloshing of Sinbad’s ship. The fourth movement had a few shaky transitions that could be chalked up to unfamiliarity with the hall.
But what spirit. In the third movement, a romance as languid as lying in bed all morning, the musicians played their hearts out. And every bit of the finale’s extravagant shipwreck went right, from the woodwinds’ whirls down to the low brasses’ bellowing of the hard-hearted sultan’s theme. This time, you could even hear the sea.
Before intermission, the ASMF musicians alone gave an instructive performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 29 in E Major.
Haydn’s 18th-century orchestra would have been around the same size as this two-dozen-person chamber group, led here by violinist Stephanie Gonley. Today, it’s uncommon to hear such tight ensemble playing. The balance was impeccable, the articulations pristine.
These details aren’t to be taken for granted in such an odd piece. The music begins in an unusually reposed triple meter. For a moment, it seems as if we’ve accidentally skipped to the minuet movement. When the dance does come later in the symphony, things at first proceed as normal. But in the trio section, the melody seems to have gone missing, droning horns and accompanying strings the only sounds to be heard.
In the composer’s day, it’s possible that a harpsichordist — perhaps Haydn himself — would have improvised a melody. Some groups add one. Happily, ASMF, leaning into the weirdness of the music, did not.
The tune is as hard to come by in the symphony’s slow movement, whose theme is batted between the violin sections as if parceled out by a parent to squabbling siblings. If the orchestra had been sitting in an antiphonal arrangement (first and second violins on opposite sides of the stage), this music would have been even more fun, but the lower strings made up for it when they bursted in with exaggerated self-importance.
The outer movements were vibrant, especially the sparkling runs in the finale. For those of us not attending the after-party, this performance was plenty festive.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
