One of the great rewards of concert life comes when a performer decides to champion a little-known or underappreciated work and helps you hear more in it than you ever suspected was there — and that’s assuming the piece was even on your radar to begin with.
Conductor James Gaffigan did exactly this during his guest appearance with the San Francisco Symphony on Thursday, April 25, making a powerful case for Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1. Anyone walking out of Davies Symphony Hall after the matinee performance would have felt compelled to think about this work in new ways.
Does anyone think about the Symphony No. 1 — also known as the Symphony in One Movement — at all? Not very likely. It’s been performed by the Symphony only once before, and that was in 1963. It’s as scarce on disc as it is in the concert hall.
Yet here was Gaffigan making a powerful and often ingenious case for a vibrant slice of midcentury Americana. If he’s right, some of us may have been too quick to write the piece off.
-San Francisco Chronicle, full review here.
