Programming--everybody talks about it and how many really do anything about it, anything creative? As any serious musician will attest, it's an art. Unfortunately, pragmatic factors, economic imperatives and marketing, and just plain, never out of fashion cowardice take over and compromise the activity. Then it's no longer an art but merely a process. Hire the soloists and fill in the blanks between.

Every symphony director struggles with programming. A scant few hold off the pressures from the laity, the board and the executive director, that is. Those select heroes are the directors who are secure in their posts and personalities and have a point of view they're willing to lay on the line. Jeffrey Kahane at the helm of the Santa Rosa Symphony is one of those-- some times. Michael Tilson Thomas is another--also inconsistently, although with an operation the size of the San Francisco Symphony Empire, too many of the other factors enter in. Put another way, programming for the full year season of a major orchestra can in no way ever become exemplary. Has to please too many, something for everyone, remember all those newcomers. Think of Peter Pastreich's rule of thumb, told by the former executive director with a smile but reflecting a working viewpoint, something like, "When neither the marketing director and artistic advisor are happy about the programming that's been worked out, I know it's about right."

It's a real problem. For an orchestra that operates on the scale of the San Francisco Symphony, one possibility would be to dedicate one of its series packages, to adventurous programming, say a six-program series. O.K. "adventurous" is a scary word, then--"exploratory" might go down better. Six programs spaced across the season just as the other series packages are, choosing a guest conductor or two as necessary, who are sympathetic to exploration. The really interested and curious in the public would have something substantial to choose. The rest of the folks would just wind up with one or two of those programs in the overlaps that occur between the subscription packages.

"Adventurous" doesn't mean all-anything programs, certainly not all-contemporary. It means programming with a point of view that plays one style or composer off another in juxtapositions that throw different light on each. It means taking chances with works by great composers that are not masterpieces. Coming up in New York City, for example, is a performance of Schumann's "Scenes from Goethe's Faust." Wonderful idea. We have not ever heard here another important choral-orchestral work of Schumann's, the secular oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri.

Recently I viewed a video of a performance in Europe done 10 years ago of Schumann's Incidental Music to Manfred, the entire melodrama, with the narration of the Byron text (in the German translation Schumann used) done with a burning intensity by a brilliant actor, and the orchestra of the RAI in Turin conducted by Piero Bellugi. It gave a authentic and powerful sense of the energy and fire of its period in Romanticism.

For some curious reason, Bartok has dropped almost out of sight. His Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is ignored. There has never been a performance here of one of his most significant works, the Cantata Profana. It's difficult but the San Francisco Symphony Chorus is more than equal to the task. If the Hungarian is too daunting, it can be performed in English. A concert performance of Duke Bluebeard's Castle is a worthy project. Tilson Thomas made a good and interesting sally into opera-in-concert with Ravel's L'enfant et les sortileges this past season, the kind of venture that deserves a follow-up.

Haydn and Mozart are well-covered, you might think. Not really. Next season, the San Francisco Symphony plays just one Haydn symphony, No. 88, and that's it. Many of their great sacred works have never graced the Symphony's programs. Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass is called upon repeatedly while others that are equally fine, greater in some respects, are passed over. Same with Mozart. His Missa Solemnis, K. 337, and the two settings of the Vespers are great works.

There are so many fine composers who are passed over. Luigi Dallapiccola is one of the unsung greats of the middle third of this century. Several years ago, the Symphony performed Alexander Zemlinsky's Symphony No. 2 (1897) and it made a powerful impression. It doesn't seem to occur to the Symphony that it's important to repeat such a work, although somehow next year we're getting a replay of Herbert Blomstedt's Nielsen Symphony No. 4, "The Inextinguishable" indeed.

The people who run the regional orchestras around here, concerned that many of their potential audience prefer to go into San Francisco to hear the big symphony, respond only with increasingly obvious programming of The Favorites. The idea of offering an attractive alternative does not occur. Back in the 1960s, it must be pointed out, Gerhard Samuel and the Oakland Symphony had no problem holding an enthusiastic and choice East Bay audience that preferred its imaginative and finely constructed programming to that in San Francisco at the time.

Just one six-pack of freshly thought-out programs across the year, or even a four-program set and I would bet that the response would be surprisingly strong. Takes a little courage, a little imagination and curiosity. Not much to ask. Just artistic leadership.

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