Overview: S.F. Symphony’s SoundBox sequence reopens with deal with music academics

One of many engines driving the event of musical historical past is the frilly internet of influences artists exert on each other. Typically this occurs immediately via instructing and private steerage; extra usually it happens at a take away of time and house.

In designing the season-opening program for SoundBox, the San Francisco Symphony’s now well-established various efficiency house and live performance sequence, the younger American composer Reena Esmail got down to discover a few of these connections by specializing in two central figures, the composers and educators Gabriela Lena Frank and the late Nadia Boulanger.

In observe, this turned out to be a considerably tenuous recreation plan, relying as such thematic programming usually does on considerably arbitrary and compelled connections. However on Friday, Dec. 9, within the first of two performances this week, it additionally yielded an array of rewarding and well-executed music.

So why complain?

The chain-of-pedagogy mannequin labored greatest and most historically within the first of this system’s three segments. Boulanger was a legendary French musician who spent an infinite chunk of the twentieth century dishing out classes — not simply in composing however in piano, counterpoint and concord as nicely — to an array of musicians starting from Elliott Carter and Leonard Bernstein to Philip Glass and Burt Bacharach.

However her personal music, written early in life, isn’t encountered in live performance. So it was a pleasure to listen to Boulanger’s Three Items for Cello and Piano, a set of quick character items by turns delicate and savage, in an eloquent rendition by Symphony cellist Sébastien Gingras and pianist John Wilson.

That section was framed by a kind of before-and-after pairing, starting with the “Sicilienne” from “Pélleas et Mélisande” by Boulanger’s trainer Gabriel Fauré, which obtained a sensuous, gently rippling account led by conductor Kyle Dickson (one of many orchestra’s younger Salonen Fellows). Chamber works by two of her college students, Aaron Copland and Astor Piazzolla, testified to the breadth and number of Boulanger’s steerage.

The case of Frank, the 50-year-old Berkeley native whose new biographical opera “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Final Dream of Frida and Diego”) is due on the San Francisco Opera in June, is a barely extra tangled one.

Her personal work was represented by two excerpts from “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout,” a bouncy, vibrantly coloured travelogue for strings (as soon as once more, Dickson formed the efficiency with elegant readability). As an alternative of considered one of her academics, although, Esmail included two Beethoven actions (one from the “Moonlight” Sonata, one from an early string quartet), primarily based on the truth that Frank, like Beethoven later in life, has restricted listening to.

Maybe the night’s most fascinating providing was the creation of considered one of Frank’s college students, the younger American composer Akshaya Avril Tucker. Tucker has immersed herself within the music of South Asia, and her “Respiratory Daylight,” a light-textured however sinewy duet for violin and cello, attracts on Indian melodic modes to create a dialogue of seductive attraction.

Notes bend and slide out and in of tune; wispy thematic figures flutter previous, implying stable harmonic constructions beneath. In just 10 minutes, Tucker constructed a beautiful fort out of air, and violinist David Chernyavsky and cellist David Goldblatt gave a delicate efficiency.

Esmail served as a genial emcee for the complete program, however solely within the final section was her music lastly heard.

“The Historical past of Purple,” a richly scored, slow-moving and considerably orotund orchestral setting of a poem by award-winning American author Linda Hogan, benefitted from an electrifying contribution from the Grammy Award-winning Israeli soprano Hila Plitmann. In step with the night’s theme, Plitmann — circling the room from one publish to a different and unleashing a sequence of vibrant and superbly tuned phrases — schooled everybody on how that is achieved.

SoundBox presents Reena Esmail: San Francisco Symphony. 9 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 10. $65. SoundBox, 300 Franklin St., S.F. 415-864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org