Ades Mendelssohn festival

Sep 30, 2013

Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado – hailed by The New York Times as “the thinking person’s idea of a hotshot young conductor” – returns to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony to lead the Orchestra and Chorus with violinist Leila Josefowicz and guest vocal soloists in a two-week Mendelssohn-Thomas Adès festival October 3 to 13 at Davies Symphony Hall. The festival’s musical focus explores and juxtaposes the works of the two composers in orchestral and chamber settings of music influenced by Shakespeare, dance, literature, and the artists’ mutual fascination with the Baroque.

The festival’s opening orchestral program, in performance October 3 to 6, features Pablo leading the first San Francisco Symphony’s first performances of Adès’ Three Studies from Couperin and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, “Scottish” on a program with Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, performed by Leila Josefowicz. Illuminating Mendelssohn and Adès’ shared enthusiasm for the Baroque, the program also includes the first SFS performances of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Overture and Passacaille from Armide (1686).

In a program inspired by William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pablo conducts the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus with a cast of soloists including soprano Audrey Luna (Ariel), mezzo-soprano Charlotte Hellekant, mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, tenor Alek Shrader, and baritone Rod Gilfry in the Orchestra’s first performances of scenes from The Tempest, Adès’ acclaimed second opera. The program, which will be performed from October 10 to 13, also includes Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the first SFS performances of Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Join the open rehearsal of this program on October 10, 2013 at 10:00am.