Shwartz opened the concert with Rossini’s La gazza ladra Overture, before conducting the Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64. Following intermission, we heard three excerpts from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen: “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried; and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” plus “Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music” from Gotterdammerung. In the latter case, that seems to me an odd way to close a concert. A Wagnerian funeral piece?

Sprouting from a violinistic family, Kim began his studies of the instrument at the age of 3. He made his debut at age 10 with the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra and has since played in a number of student and professional orchestras, garnering a caboodle of prizes along the way. Indeed, this solo performance was earned by his winning the SFSYO’s Concerto Competition. Talent? Obviously, but in such quantity as to set a new standard of expectations from youths.

Playing a three-quarter-size violin, to accommodate his smaller hands, Kim created a remarkable level of power that filled the hall with a perfectly mellow sound. His intonation, even in the highest positions of the fingerboard, was spot on.

Kim clearly knew no fear of Mendelssohn’s technically tricky passagework. Near the end of the first movement’s cadenzas, for example, there’s a string of fast spiccato arpeggios. The trick is to keep them rhythmically accurate as the bow literally skips back and forth across the four strings. He accomplished this flawlessly.

Justly Praised to the Skies

But hold on, there’s more to this than mere technical propriety. Kim’s maturity of phrasing, not unlike Yehudi Menuhin’s, was the very soul of Romantic tastefulness: richly eloquent, often original in applying rubato to melodic lines, and passionately involved throughout. Now, it’s beyond me how a boy who turned 13 only last month can even have a clue to what such mature passion is about. His multiple bows were greeted by standing ovations and more flowers that he could comfortably carry off stage.

Rossini’s Overture also went exceedingly well, highlighted by lots of subtle comic touches, as well as seriously elegant playing from the strings and woodwinds. Mind you, Gazza ladra is no snap to play. It requires a lot of technical fireworks in the orchestration, yet when it works, the effect is a sonic charm machine.

That brings us to the downers, the Wagner excerpts. There had been one or two minor horn bloopers in the Rossini and Mendelssohn pieces, but nothing serious. The young lady who played the offstage horn solo in the “Rhine Journey” gave an excellent performance, replete with the final high C. The strings too were fine, being well-matched in timbre and keenly in control of the dynamics, especially for Wagner’s ultrasoft passages. The various woodwind birdcall imitations during the Forest music came off like a lark, always with clear delineations when they turned contrapuntal, piling up on one another. No problems with any of that.

But the heavy brass kept falling off its normal standards. Trumpets played admirably, even the player confronted with the unwieldy bass trumpet. There were, however, far too many raspberries coming out of the horn section.

Trombones blared their way through climaxes as if playing “Anything you can do, I can do louder.” Goodness, this isn’t some football field. Worse was their playing of those foreboding chords that open the Rhine journey piece, where the instrumentalists simply could not seem to deal with the intonation necessary for Wagner’s chromatics.

That Shwartz took unusually slow tempos for most of these pieces was no help. Believe it or not, that increases their difficulty. Conductors have sometimes been able to pull this off by sheer dint of intensity — notably so in the case of Otto Klemperer. The larger truth, though, is that in this case Shwartz had thrown repertoire at his orchestra that was unrealistic for them.

I’ve heard the SFSYO, including this present group, pull off extremely virtuoso music with brilliance; but after all, there are limits. It’s not an orchestra made up entirely of young Stephen Kims.

San Francisco Girls Chorus

The program may have seemed long at first glance, but when performed without an intermission it turned out to be a bit shorter than most. Conductor Susan McMane opened with David Willcocks’ setting of Psalm 150 (1984), Fauré’s Ave verum, Op. 65, No. 1 (1894), and Poulenc’s Litanies á la Vierge noire (Litanies of the black virgin) (1936). Organist David Higgs, chairman of the Organ Department at the Eastman School of Music, then soloed with Maurice Duruflé’s Toccata from his Op. 5 Suite (1933).

Back to the vocal performances, we heard the substantial Dreams, Op. 85 (1978) by the late Finnish composer Erik Bergman, David MacIntyre’s Ave Maria (1994), Rachmaninov’s The Angel (1895), the premiere of Augusta Read Thomas’ Two E.E. Cummings Songs (2008), plus three pieces of Americana: Stephen Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer, the folk hymn How Can I Keep From Singing? and the spiritual So Many Angels! To fill in for the demanded encore, McMane led I Dream a World.

Bergman (1911-2006), who taught at the Sibelius Academy, was principally interested in writing choral music, and hence is not as well-known as he deserves to be. Whereas his texts were normally set in Finnish, his three-movement Dreams presents no such challenge. That’s because it contains no texts as such, only a landscape of vocal murmurs, as well as rapid, repeated vocalizations on things such as boon, zing, or pheuw, sometimes in free improvisation.

Clearly, Bergman knew of the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman, but avoided their techniques in any outright fashion. They were only his springboard. The effect of his three sections — “Echos,” “Solitude,” and “Restlessness” — created a magical, otherworldly aesthetic of highly original and spiritual implications. Wonderful solo episodes within the compositions were taken by Amelia De Snoo and Katherine Sommer during “Echoes,” and by Sian Wittke during “Solitude.” I say unto you, this is a most moving masterpiece, one worth knowing.

Gorgeous Litanies

The other masterpiece on the program was Poulenc’s ultraserious Litanies, written after his pilgrimage to the religious site of Rocamadour, which happens to have a Black Madonna statue. The piece is almost painfully beautiful, especially when sung so well as by the S.F. Girls Chorus. Fauré’s religious music is always lovely, of course, but while sounding so in his Ave verum, the general effect struck me as rather ordinary. It left no memorable impression.

So, too, with the Willcocks setting of Psalm 150 and MacIntyre’s Ave Maria, each set to jaunty Latin American dance patterns. Canadian MacIntyre, however, broke with the traditional “Hail Mary” poem. He used only the two Latin words of the title, repeating them over and over during the full composition. I fear these are merely an effort to turn out catchy pieces for the sake of programming variety. Willcocks is best known for his long association with, and many recordings with, the King’s College Singers of Cambridge University. But he’s obviously no composer, only an adherer of the rules.

The oddest thing on the program turned out to be the Rachmaninov work, The Angel, for female chorus with piano accompaniment, sung in Russian. The composer’s honeyed piano part is so elaborate in sonority as to be overbearing — and, let me hasten to add, that was not pianist Susan Soehner’s fault. The work comes off as a piano piece accompanied by a choir: a kind of upside down texture.

The most disappointing item for me was Thomas’ settings of E.E. Cummings poems: sky candy spouting violets and (kiss me). Written on commission from our Girls Chorus, the two songs are quite professional and neatly put together, as I would expect from such a well-known composer. Yet I sensed nothing much in the way of personality in them. They were simply there, giving out neither offense nor any pleasurable freshness. I suspect that Thomas felt a little inhibited by fears for what kids can accomplish, though in the case of this chorus she needn’t have.

Of the three traditional American tunes performed, How Can I Keep From Singing? was the most effective because of its simple, direct arrangement by Karen P. Thomas. Each of the other two was embedded in sentimentalized, Romantic goo. In the case of So Many Angels! the performance was further hampered by a constant use of hand gestures, as designed by Brian Fisher. Alack, this wasn’t a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta excerpt.

It’s All in the Keys

Duruflé’s music has always struck me as music that only organists can love. There’s a lot of flashy keyboard work, true, but the absence of melodic invention glares. The only thing of his to gain repertoire status is his setting of the Requiem. But even there he was merely arranging all the original Gregorian chants. Melodically, there’s nothing of his own in it, nor is there much beyond a flurry of notes to be heard in his Toccata.

David Higgs holds a considerable international reputation, and regularly plays at the dedication ceremonies for major new organs. For this program he accompanied Willcocks’ Psalm 150, as well as performing Duruflé’s Toccata. I was much surprised to hear him badly misjudge the acoustics of Calvary Presbyterian. It’s a normal-size church, not a cathedral, and hence relatively compact. To let loose with the organ’s full power during climaxes created dins that came perilously close to the threshold of pain.

Which reminded me of a news item heard something like 40 years ago. Some reporter picked the text of a UN speech out of the garbage, and found a penciled trope in the margin: “Weak point — shout!” That attitude may have been Higgs’ way of trying to sell essentially weak music. Of course, that’s just a guess.

Bartók’s Dance Suite (1923) opened the afternoon, followed by the Sibelius Violin Concerto (1905) in D Minor, Op. 47, with Jennifer Koh as soloist. Following intermission, the program was rounded off with a dozen excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet, Op. 64 (1936): “The Montagues and Capulets,” “The Street Awakening,” “Morning Dance,” “The Quarrel,” “The Fight,” “The Balcony Scene,” “Folk Dance,” “Romeo and Mercutio,” “Public Merrymaking,” “Dance With Mandolins,” “Dance of the Girls With Lilies,” and “The Death of Tybalt.”

The Prokofiev excerpts were, indeed, all that could be hoped for. The orchestra raged when called on, as in those thunderous dissonant chord clusters of the opening, or, by contrast, it virtually purred with warmth during the lyrically Romantic sections. The young performers’ playing of “The Balcony Scene” was as beautiful in timbre and emotional communication as that which any top professional orchestra might provide.

On the other hand, the virtuosity of the strings and winds for the fast perpetual-motion music of the swordfight music proved breathtaking in its bravura uniformity of ensemble. Everything was there: intonation, bowing precision, fullness of volume, and apparent ease of execution as the segment whizzed along with outstanding vigor. Both visually as well as in sonic splendor, this was superb playing.

Shwartz also had the advantage of using the full original orchestration, rather than the reduced version of the concert suites drawn from the ballet. Thus, he had six horns rather than the four called for in the suites, as well as all four mandolins that Prokofiev asked for. (Those mandolins, by the way, were perfectly played by members of the viola and cello sections, showing how versatile and virtuosic these youths are.)

When I once asked conductor Antal Dorati why Bartók’s masterful Dance Suite, his second most important orchestral composition, was so seldom programmed, he answered, “Because it’s so damned difficult that it requires more rehearsal time than the Concerto for Orchestra. And, as it’s half the length, one might as well go ahead and play the Concerto.”

There’s the pity of it. This fifth of Bartók’s suites was his last. There are the two large symphonic suites, Opp. 3 and 4; the two ballet suites (from The Wooden Prince, Op. 13, and The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19); and finally the Dance Suite. The latter is the more complex of the lot. It consists of five dances, kneaded by a small set of variations on a gentle theme, marked ritornello: that is, a returning element that bridges the often barbaric, and occasionally ghoulish, dances into continuous play. Something of the sort may be familiar to many from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exposition, with its Promenade ritornello.

Sterling Playing, With a Caution

Many of the performances by the Youth Orchestra were sterling, although moments of lax ensemble work were heard in the trickier rhythmic sections. That was especially true during the opening dance, brimming with cross rhythms as it does. It didn’t help that Shwartz was watching his score rather than the eyes of his musicians. As pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow once observed to the young Richard Strauss, “The score should be in your head, not your head in the score.”

There are times in the piece when the players really needed watching. Indeed, it was said that Fritz Reiner conducted more music with his eyes than his baton. Much of the performance was crackerjack, but an additional rehearsal might have helped put the last kernels in place.

The profundity of the Sibelius Concerto sounded set aside for the sake of bravura, especially by violinist Koh. She tended to rush, sometimes dashing ahead of the orchestra. True, she played all the notes, and brilliantly, but now and then she squeezed the rhythmic values too tightly.

Then too, the finale was taken too quickly. It is, after all, marked “Allegro ma non troppo” (Fast, but not too much). What Koh played sounded like a virtuoso gush rather than the profoundly tragic bolero that Sibelius intended. The orchestra accompanied very well indeed, and clearly with more self-control than their soloist displayed.

As encores, Shwartz offered zesty performances of the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, plus a section of Gershwin’s Cuban Overture.

Now the prize-winning youth orchestra is off to perform in Europe, with concerts in Berlin, Munich, and Prague, besides appearances at three regional German festivals: the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival in Rostock, the Audi Summer Concerts in Ingolstadt, and the European Festival Week in Passau. Their violin soloist will be the Austrian virtuoso Julian Recline.

Besides the music on Sunday’s farewell program, tour repertoire is to include John Adams’ Lollapalooza, Chausson’s Poème, and Saint-Saëns’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccio (both with Recline as soloist), plus Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”

McCarroll opened with Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, followed by Kabat playing the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 107. After an intermission, Wang closed the concert with another performance of the Brahms Concerto. Wang played the Fritz Kreisler cadenza, as opposed to the traditional Joseph Joachim cadenza used in McCarroll’s performance.

Once the smoke of battle had cleared, the judges held their powwow, which took a bit of time. Deciding was clearly not an easy task. It had been evident that the first place ($11,000, plus additional professional engagements) would go to violinist Wang. Picking the second- and third-place winners must have been a bear, as the playing of McCarroll and Kabat could be separated in quality by only the width of a frog’s hair. Ultimately, McCarroll was awarded second place ($5,000), and Kabat the third ($2,500).

Around the World

Wang, now 22 years old, was born in China, but made his first public appearance at age 6. That took place halfway around the world, in France. When his family moved to Canada, Wang enrolled at the Québec Conservatory, later moving on to New York’s Juilliard School. He has remained there doing his advanced studies, but considering Sunday’s performance, I’m not convinced that he needs any more polish.

All three competitors possess solid technique and a full command of their instruments. But Wang’s performance displayed a bit more mastery of the intangibles. Those things cannot be taught; you either have it or you don’t. Finesse of phrasing, for instance, in which a given few notes can be momentarily searched or compressed, backed down in intensity or accented, is vital to a great performance. In the case of string players, it means subtle adjustment to bow strength and length, plus believe it or not, good breath control. Musicians don’t just play an instrument with their fingers and hands. The entire body goes into the production of tone, although that can easily get out of control if the musician wiggles and shakes to the point of distraction.

Wang’s sensibility to subtle subaccents, when added to his pinpoint intonation and general beauty of phrasing, resulted in as fine a performance of the horrifyingly difficult Brahms Concerto as I’ve ever encountered. All this bespeaks the potential for a long and probably major career.

Born in Santa Rosa, McCarroll studied privately in Sonoma before transferring to Berkeley’s Crowden School at age eight. By age 13 he had been invited to the famous Yehudi Menuhin School near London. Once he thought he’d mined that institution, it was on to Boston’s New England Conservatory. With such a background, his overall performance of the Brahms was quite fine.

What held him back a little was a nervous first half of the first movement, not helped by some surprisingly cavalier playing from the orchestra. That straightened itself out along the way, and by the time the cadenza and final coda area appeared, all was well. McCarroll’s slow movement was probing in its depth of expression yet elegantly sung out with a touch of classicism that I found heartening. So the flaws were minor, but enough to drop Carroll into second place.

Twenty-year-old Kabat made her debut at age 18 with no less than the Cleveland Orchestra. She studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music before moving into advanced studies with Norman Fisher, of the late Concord Quartet at Rice University. Her virtuosity was breathtaking, brimming with fire and secure pyrotechnics. But while technically impressive, her dynamics ranged between loud and louder. That and her tendency toward literal metronomic consistency, produced a hard-sell aspect that offered more flash than musical communication.

A friend and onetime teacher tells the story of a jury he sat on with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. When a young cello contestant finished playing, Piatigorsky turned and said, “Now she needs to survive a desperate love affair.” I fear that kind of attitude is all too true. It is yet another aspect of performance that cannot be taught.

The one serious flaw of the afternoon was its length, gravely aided by too many speeches, remembrances, and thankings of this and that person. That’s for program books, not to brandish before a captive audience. It’s becoming epidemic at Bay Area concerts — a severe outbreak of yackety-yak disease.

Benjamin Shwartz

Conductor Benjamin Shwartz had programmed a brace of important works: Colin McPhee’s Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936) for expanded orchestra, and following intermission, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (Op. 125). For the choral finale of the Beethoven, the orchestra was joined by soprano Elza van den Heever, mezzo-soprano Kendall Gladen, tenor Sean Panikkar, and bass-baritone Jeremy Galyon, plus the full S.F. Symphony Chorus. By concert’s end, I suspect that most of us in attendance would have liked all the amassed forces to reprise the entire program, as an encore.

Born in Quebec, McPhee (1900-1964) became intrigued by Balinese gamelan music by means of recordings, and in 1931 he moved to Bali. His work there resulted in his book, Music of Bali, which has remained the major academic study of the subject to this day. He would eventually end up teaching composition and ethnomusicology at UCLA, composing relatively little. While I have never heard a poor, let alone “bad,” piece by McPhee, his three-movement Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra and Two Pianos remains his finest and most-famed work. (Curiously, no part of the program lists the names of the two terrific young pianists.)

Although McPhee used the term toccata in his title, what he created is really a form of sinfonia concertante for large orchestra, with two harps and the two pianos, plus an expanded percussion section set against a large, triple-wind modern orchestra. Despite its numbers, the work is predominantly quiet and delicate, a thing of glittering sounds and reserve energy. How it has remained so neglected over the years is mystifying, for Tabuh-Tabuhan strikes me as a landmark of 20th-century music. It is utterly original and sounds much like a finger pointed in the direction of future minimalism.

Astonishing Artistry of Young Players

The sheer artistry with which the teen instrumentalists played so exotic a work was amazing. All the technical matter fell into place, as one might expect for an internationally heralded ensemble. But beyond the basics, such as intonation, balances, flawless ensemble, and the like, their beauty of timbre during all that soft, fast music was magical.

Beethoven’s Ninth presents another kind of thorny problem. It brims with booby traps set for the unwary, but Shwartz had his musicians on high alert, absolutely right on the money both for the aesthetics and for the technical mastery of the score. The fierceness of the first movement, the sheer bravado of the scherzo, and the implication of religious fervor were exceptional in all respects. The strings covered themself with warmth in their slow movement, and I noted some outstanding playing from the orchestra’s principal bassoonist. But then, all the winds played as if possessed.

The four vocal soloists were drawn from the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, all of them having been Adler Fellows. They’re cream of the crop and were heard recently in solo performances in the Bay Area. (Soprano van den Heever virtually knocked my socks off recently at Old First Church during her stirring performance of Ravel’s Shéhérazade.)

Funny, but I’d never noticed much of anything of importance in the symphony’s mezzo role until Gladen took hold of it. (The legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler once quipped that for the Ninth you need a top-class baritone, an excellent tenor, and a soprano with strong top notes, adding, “The alto has only to stand there and look pretty.” Obviously, he never had a Gladen available to him.)

But it’s the two male vocalists who confront the lion’s share of problems in the finale. That notorious opening recitative for baritone is, frankly, unreasonable. Its range is too extreme, and a majority of the time either the very high or very low notes will suffer. I’ve sat through performances in which both extremes missed the mark.

Superb Baritone and Tenor, Take-Charge Chorus

To my delight, Galyon nailed it. His was one of the most impressive accounts I’ve encountered, whether live or on recordings. So was tenor Panikkar’s performance during the little martial section. He flowed through it with just the right hint of swagger, showing neither strain nor effort as he maintained his crystal tones, and at full volume. Of course, the Ninth is like mother’s milk to the S.F. Symphony’s decorated chorus. Give the downbeat, and then get out of they way; they’ll do it proud, almost on their own.

On Sunday I lucked out, having been given seats in the loge. That added an air of surprise to the concert, for I was able to gaze down on the full ensemble and observe the miraculous bowing of the string section. Not only were the players together in terms of upstrokes and downstrokes, but they also maintained the same positions of their bow tips over the strings.

To maintain such uniformity of purpose is not ordinarily anticipated from players under the age of 20 — the Youth Orchestra’s cutoff age. After all, these are largely high school students, or at least I think they are. (I admit to being a terrible judge of ages, and goofed when recently reviewing S.F. Symphony’s other youth organization, the Academy; I thought it was made up of schoolkids, though in fact they were advanced students. Apologies!)

In a terse speech, S.F. Symphony President John D. Goodman beckoned for a considerable number of Youth Orchestra alumni in the audience to take a bow, together with several of their past conductors. In honor of the occasion, a proclamation from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was read, declaring May 20 Youth Symphony Day. I hope it’s permanent.

Conductor Parvulescu and cellist Lawrence Granger opened the evening with Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2 in D Major (Op. 101), then, after a brief intermission, followed it with the Suite from Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella.

The orchestra grew out of the S.F. Symphony’s 6-year-old Classics for Kids program. Members of the orchestra head out into schools to play programs for schoolchildren, followed by Q&A sessions. For many kids, this amounts to their first experience with live classical music. The Academy Orchestra blends talented student musicians with a few professionals of the S.F. Symphony sitting in first-chair posts. It’s a matter of leading by example.

Anyone reviewing young people might make an allowance for their relative inexperience. I had been a bit concerned over the prospects of the tricky Pulcinella score, with its “pat your head and rub your tummy” passages. (O ye of little faith.)

Not to worry. These were performances of professional caliber, with only an occasional minor belch in the texture showing up. Now and then a solo passage revealed a smidgen of miscalculation, but none was too grievous, on the whole. Matters of articulation, intonation, and phrasing were right on the button.

Young Players Up to the Challenge

Parvulescu, a Romanian musician who joined the S.F. Symphony’s first violin section in 1998, conducted handsomely, using clear, unexaggerated gestures free of grandstanding. He set solid, appropriate tempos throughout, not blinking when Stravinsky asked for breakneck speeds. His was a strength that was always at the ready, and the orchestra responded with faith in him, as well as in the music.

Haydn wrote a great many concertos, of which the D-Major Cello Concerto is by far the most frequently programmed. It also happens to be the only one in high virtuoso style, likely because his Prince Esterházy had hired for his court orchestra the cellist Anton Kraft, widely recognized as a supervirtuoso of the day. Haydn could thus throw all caution to the wind for this work, which is indeed a terror to play — it is, as a cellist friend once referred to it, a “white-knuckle concerto.”

Granger, also a member of the S.F. Symphony, demonstrated a fine feeling for both the mechanics of the music and Haydnesque style. His performance of the slow movement was especially moving, and the finale lovingly lilting. Here and there, those stratospheric double stops — Haydn’s version of a dare — sounded a little itchy-scratchy, but that’s only human. I’ve never heard a live performance of the work without something going amiss. Bravo, Lawrence Granger!

Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s seven-movement suite after Pergolesi — and “after” other works mistaken for Pergolesi’s music at the time — constitutes one of the great charm machines of the Stravinsky canon. The composer took the original Baroque pieces and turned them into something approaching cubisticlike studies of the Baroque. In line with the originals, he also orchestrated the individual sections into almost concerto-grosso fashion. Some feature first-desk strings, others the winds, and one, in a grand expression of a sonic raspberry, a solo trombone — superbly done on Sunday, by the way.

Considering that the concert had been given scant publicity, a crowd of some 300-plus turned up. Its enthusiasm was even larger than the crowd itself. Whenever the music stopped for a brief pause, someone or other was breaking into applause. The oddest thing was that a single person kept on with it, once the music had resumed. Now there’s a first for you, or at least for me.

If you would like to check on future programs of the Academy Orchestra, you might want to visit its Web site, at www.sfacademyorchestra.org. It’s a local joy not to be missed.