
SAN DIEGO — Three-plus months is as good a chronological waypoint as any for assessing the San Diego Symphony’s trajectory since it moved into its acoustically renovated home, Jacobs Music Center. Across some 17 performances since the hall’s late-September unveiling, the orchestra has continued to grow musically, deepening in versatility and confidence.
Its performance Jan. 11 of a mostly French program, two Saint-Saëns works and a little-known gem by Augusta Holmès (La nuit et l’amour), revealed a disciplined, unanimous band capable of astonishing color and enormous sound. Injecting a certain Gallic elegance — witness the sumptuous sheen of the string section — the understated French conductor Ludovic Morlot led a distinguished account of Saint-Saëns’ Violin Concerto No. 3 in B Minor (1880) and a thrilling Symphony No. 3 in C minor (Organ, 1886).
In the concerts here, another low-key leader, concertmaster Jeff Thayer, met the concerto’s every technical challenge — complex harmonics and double-stops, delicate bariolage passages, rapid shifts between arco and pizzicato, etc. — with cool, no-nonsense confidence and a bright, songful sound. Thayer, who plays the 1708 “Bagshawe” Stradivarius joined the ensemble in 2004, shortly after its traumatizing bankruptcy. Though a leader by choice and temperament, he’s no drill sergeant. He has called chamber music the “ideal form of making music,” and he brought that genre’s self-effacing ideal to his solo turn.
Thayer’s anti-diva demeanor notwithstanding, his easygoing virtuosity inspired an audience ovation at the end of the first movement. In the second, his sustained control culminated in a flawless, flute-like “timbral fusion” with principal clarinetist Sheryl Renk in the closing measures. In the third, Thayer channeled Pablo de Sarasate (the concerto’s dedicatee) by subduing the movement’s brisk spiccato passages and thorny coda. “Conquered difficulty is itself a source of beauty,” Saint-Saëns once wrote. Thayer got the message.

Saint-Saëns is remembered today as a musical reactionary who famously dismissed Debussy’s Prelude a l’Apres-midi d’un faune (“One does not find in it the least musical idea”) and groused at Dukas and Stravinsky. But his own innovations were many, from experiments with bitonality and Arabic music’s augmented seconds to one of the very first film scores (L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, 1908).
The innovations of his C minor Symphony include the non-soloistic integration of his favorite instrument, the organ, and an unusual two-movement structure in place of the traditional four. The composer was so proud of the C minor — commissioned by London’s Royal Philharmonic Society and conducted there by Saint-Saëns himself — that he never wrote another: “I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again.”
Morlot, the orchestra, and guest organist Weichang Zhao — the first Chinese to win international pipe organ competitions — seized on the unique score with special relish. In this first star turn for the organ since the Jacobs Music Center reopened, Zhao blended into the orchestra’s textures; even in seats fairly close to the pipes’ chambers, his entrances merged smoothly into the mix (though the instrument’s power could be felt).
Everyone seemed to step up. The brass, especially the trombones, supplied thrilling volume. The strings, often the least-extroverted section in the early season, played with luxurious, layered polish. Even the two pianists (for the four-hand passages) drew Morlot’s invitation for a sectional bow. But it was the whole orchestra’s precision-tooled unity that made the symphony cook, provoking a vocal standing ovation across the house.

Holmès (1847-1903), whose La nuit et l’amour (Night and Love) preceded the organ symphony, had multiple claims for her six-minute moment in the program. Not only was she French (born to Irish parents) and trained by César Franck, but Saint-Saëns once proposed to her. She never replied. Draw your own conclusions when he later described her as “The Lonely One” and “an extremist” of “excessive virility.” Holmès’ La nuit, an orchestral extract from a five-movement “symphonic ode” for narrator, chorus, and orchestra, was a revelation: gorgeous melodies, expertly scored, no gendered language needed. Here’s to a revival of one of her four long-forgotten operas.
Holmès’ final claim to program space is the identity she shares with Gabriella Smith, whose Bioluminescence Chaconne opened the concert. Even on a San Diego weekend in which 13 works by 11 female composers were featured in three separate classical concerts, the shared identity is still a noteworthy fact. The percentage of living female composers might be 40 percent, but the percentage of published or programmed woman composers ranges only between two and 14 percent, depending on whom you ask.
The title of Smith’s 14-minute Bioluminescence Chaconne may sound inelegantly post-modernist, and even the orchestra’s pre-concert explainer admitted it has “no graspable melodies,” but the piece is well worth a listen. A graduate of the Curtis Institute, the 33-year-old wrote Bioluminescence in memory of teenage night dives off California’s Channel Islands. It’s a truly virtuosic evocation of the living ocean. Rocking strings conjure a continual shimmer of movement, trombone glissandos evoke whale calls, ascending bass chords suggest darker depths, tuba squawks recall the playful or whimsical elements in the scores of Smith’s mentor, John Adams. If the piece overstayed its welcome before petering out, it enabled the orchestra to do what it may do best: paint an astonishing array of sonic color.