SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Symphony’s 2025-26 season came to an end over the past weekend on a hopeful note, thankfully. If the season had concluded about a month earlier, the scenario would have been quite different. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s acrimonious departure as music director was still fresh in memory with no successor in sight, the orchestra was slogging through a season of guest conductors, and pundits were questioning whether the SFS was shrinking into provincial status.
Everything changed in an instant. On May 21, Elim Chan was announced as the next SFS music director starting in fall 2027. She will be the first female to head one of America’s Big Seven orchestras. It came as a surprise to many music lovers down south who thought that the Los Angeles Philharmonic was about to grab her, for she had impressed listeners and orchestra members there with her musicianship and energy. (Instead, the LA Phil chose British conductor Daniel Harding.)
Suddenly the SFS, whose board had faced charges of backsliding for letting the progressive-minded Salonen walk, looked like bold adventurers. Now all three of San Francisco’s major musical organizations will have Asian female music directors, with Hong Kong’s Chan joining San Francisco Opera’s Eun Sun Kim (South Korea) and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus’ Jenny Wong (Hong Kong).
Into this brighter picture stepped Stéphane Denève, music director of the St. Louis Symphony, at Davies Symphony Hall on June 25, just ahead of the annual Gay Pride festivities that would tie up the Civic Center the following three days. Zeroing in on his heritage, Denève devoted his program entirely to music by French composers that had been influenced by the Germans, principally Beethoven. The orchestra sounded refreshed, perhaps now secure in knowing how its future is going to unfold.
At the same time, bittersweet memories of the recent past dominated the corridors of Davies Hall. The first tier lobby featured an exhibit of photographs from Michael Tilson Thomas’ days and nights as music director and music director laureate. The previous week’s concerts, which contained Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and MTT’s saucy Agnegram, were dedicated to his memory (he died on April 22). Denève, who succeeded MTT as artistic director of the New World Center in Miami Beach, announced to the audience that he, too, was dedicating his concerts to MTT and his husband/manager, Joshua Robison, whose death preceded the conductor’s by exactly two months.
First came a bustling 10 minutes of orchestral fury and vitality by Guillaume Connesson titled Flammenschrift (“Fire Letter”) that feeds upon the flames from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It’s a jazzy start that channels Leonard Bernstein (a Beethoven fanatic himself), but from there, the piece succeeds in conjuring the desired image of “an angry, seething, impetuous” Beethoven while at the same time conveying rambunctious joy in doing so — and in modified Beethovenian sonata form at that. The SFS seemed to relish going at it, urged on and on by Denève.
With a theatrically graceful sweep of his legs onto the organ bench, the noted French organist Olivier Latry laced into the Poulenc Organ Concerto in G minor with its crunching initial chord, followed by a subtle, veiled selection of stops, pushing the extremes of dynamics on the hall’s Ruffatti pipe organ. The primary German influence in this piece, certainly at the beginning, seems to be J. S. Bach — that is, until Poulenc goes off to the races with a decidedly French accent, moving back and forth between solemn proclamations and circusy flourishes. Denève enforced fleet tempos as the SFS showed no signs of distress in this interregnum between music directors.
Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 (Organ) figures in the SFS book of historical landmarks. The revered Pierre Monteux led the orchestra’s first performance back in 1931, and it was one of the first pieces to be recorded shortly after the hall’s pipe organ made its debut in April 1984. Then-music-director Edo de Waart’s persuasively propulsive SFS performance from that time is well worth hearing.
The Organ Symphony is too often taken for granted by orchestras that need guaranteed crowd-pleasing material to make occasional use of their hall’s built-in pipe organs. But there was nothing routine about this performance. From the outset, Denève was on the job, carefully shaping the dynamic contours of the piece, always aware of the subtle pulse behind the string rustlings in the opening movement. His tempos were brisk, and he applied a light, almost transparent touch in the French manner and turning on the bombast where applicable — a combination that felt exactly right.
Latry returned to the organ console in the second half of the first movement, subtly underlining the big tunes without overpowering. He unleashed all of the firepower of the Ruffatti in the thundering, grandiose — and wonderful — finale, revving it up with Denève and the SFS in the coda to full impact at the end. I don’t remember when I’ve heard a better performance. Leave it to a couple of distinguished Frenchmen to make it happen.
