San Francisco Classical Voice

There's the manicurist and the pointedly "woman" bus driver. And from the shopkeeper, we hear:

my land's besieged
my faith a crime,

And last of all the day laborers, from "peru, mexico, nicaragua, el salvador, puerto rico, colombia, guatemala," as the libretto goes on. Putting Peru ahead of Mexico in the litany was a neat, though slightly disingenuous, touch. There may be Peruvian day laborers in Oakland, but I'd hazard that they are very few.

For some reason, nowhere in Ms. major's panorama of Oakland was there any place for the players of the OEBS itself. But that's a small omission, after all.

Galindo's work was neatly devised and cleverly scored, even if the performance itself fell a little flat. The Oakland Symphony Chorus wasn't spitting out words as it should — not that making "Stride, glide, collide" clear to the ear is easy in the best of circumstances. The solo singing was patchy, with some fine vocalism from whoever sang the manicurist's aria, but uneven work from the other soloists. (The female soloists were drawn from the chorus, and marked out with asterisks in the program, but it was nowhere made clear who sang what. They were also massively amplified, not always in their best interests.) The only guest soloist was tenor Trente Morant, who sang the keening, melismatic, repeated solo of the very brief "second movement" quietly and beautifully.

Galindo's music resisted the obvious temptations to pop-music references. It was full of textural interest (I particularly liked the almost-Kabuki percussion-led opening to that small second movement), and not particularly hard on the choir or the soloists. And devorah major, who performed all the spoken text herself, is a wonderful speaking actress, enough so that even when her own words on the page looked rather lame, they weren't when they were heard.

The remainder of the program was Russian: the prelude to Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina before the Galindo, and Rachmaninov's Second Symphony afterward. The Mussorgsky came off well. The strings were atmospheric, the winds occasionally obstreperous. That is a piece that deserves to be played much more often. There aren't many quiet, short opera preludes apart from Lohengrin, and this is every bit as lovely as that.

The Rachmaninov wasn't as much of a success. I suppose it's unfair, but it's practically impossible to hear this piece without substituting another orchestra mentally, preferably as sumptuous a one as possible. The OEBS is many things, but not "sumptuous." The brass indeed make a splendid sound, but one that pretty much buried the strings most of the time they were playing. And there was so much that went unhighlighted. The introduction to the first movement is, played well, almost agonizing — the slow buildup to the place where all the upper strings come in on a high "C," just a little apart from one another, can be overwhelming. It wasn't.

The scherzo was tauter than I'd expected it to be, and if the slow movement was a little underpowered in the string department, the built-in sultriness carried it anyway. (The man sitting just in front of me took the opportunity of the opening bars to put his arm over his female companion's shoulder.) It was the finale that actually came alive, though. I'd thought the other movements a little tame, but Morgan spurred the orchestra on to a performance that was genuinely exciting, the kind that makes a critic forget that critics are ordinarily supposed to be condescending about RachmaniNovember Why it took off just there, I don't know, but it made for a great finish to an uneven, but certainly interesting, evening.

(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)