Thomas Adès at the S.F. Symphony

Although the cunning folks at the San Francisco Symphony are billing this concert as “MTT Conducts Mozart and Stravinsky,” the real excitement is going to come from the local premiere of Thomas Adès' Polaris, a co-commission of the SFS, with video by Tal Rosner. The composer describes the piece in his recent SFCV artist spotlight. “[While composing Polaris], I took my first trip to Grand Canyon. That experience definitely gave me the key to how to end the piece. It had to end in a space that was everything at once.”

Polaris refers, obviously, to the North Star, one of the fixed reference points for navigation and travel for centuries. But that suggested the idea of magnetism (with its poles of attraction). And so the piece contains several waves of increasing orchestral density, as if the music is being pulled in to, or flung out from, a central pitch. The piece is definitely one of the poles of attraction in the SFS centennial season, and anticipation is high.