The San Diego Symphony had a gala night on Friday. (I haven’t had a gal a night since my twenties.)

San Diego Symphony Gala

^{Courtesy photo}

Conductor Jahja Ling led the ladies and gentlemen of the orchestra in a brisk, straightforward performance of Beethoven’s First Symphony.

There was a special reason for programming that symphony—100 years ago, an organization billing itself as the San Diego Symphony opened its season with the same work, performed at the U.S. Grant Hotel Dec. 6, 1910.

The group which identified itself as the San Diego Symphony Orchestra a century ago bears little resemblance to our Symphony today. Those few dozen musicians in 1910 had to perform that first concert in the afternoon, in order to get to their regular jobs in theaters and dance halls that evening.

If any of those musical pioneers were around today, I imagine they’d be astonished at the San Diego Symphony’s technical prowess. Cohesive ensemble work, disciplined control of dynamics, masterly solos from principals, all done with unimpeachable intonation—those early 20^th-century musicians would no doubt marvel at how well our modern orchestra plays.

Friday night’s performance was in the Balboa Theatre. This welcome change in venue allowed for more intimacy than Copley Hall, as well as extra luster and definition to their sound, courtesy of the Balboa’s acoustics.

To make this event more special, superstar Yo-Yo Ma soloed with the Symphony in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor. When the early San Diego Symphony gave their first concert in 1910, Dvorak had only been dead for 6 years. Surprisingly, it took another 46 years for the Symphony to finally perform Dvorak’s concerto, with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.

Ma has made enough appearances in San Diego for audiences to know he is one of the finest cellists today. His tone is striking, a clear and sweet sound that is always on pitch. His melodic work is supported by a beautiful cantabile, most impressive in his upper register, where he can climb to the top of his instrument’s range without ever compromising his intonation or lyrical sound.

Dvorak’s concerto is the greatest 19^th-century vehicle for the cello, and in the hands of a virtuoso like Ma, it was given a passionate reading in the first movement, a gorgeous rendition in the slow movement, and a gleeful, soaring account in the last.

For the past several seasons, Ling and the orchestra have been reliably inspired when accompanying a compelling soloist. They continued this streak Friday evening, with outstanding work from the principal winds and the concertmaster. This was a performance that would have ennobled any American orchestra; that the San Diego Symphony plays at such a high level should be a source of civic pride.

I’ve said it before here, and I’ll repeat: the Symphony is at a zenith this year, playing as well, if not better than the Atherton era in the mid-1980’s. Anyone who enjoys classical music should make the trip downtown to hear these musicians while they’re on top of their game.

Would that Beethoven had been as exciting as the Dvorak concerto. Ling’s tempos were propulsive, the ensemble work crisp and the intonation flawless—all in all, a technically superb performance. What was missing, however—and this is still an issue that pops up in Ling’s conducting—was heart.

Beethoven’s First may not be a momentous composition, but it is very playful. Take the opening introduction, which teases the listener as to its key and as to when the allegro proper will start. In Ling’s hand, this became a matter-of-fact opening.

Similarly, the introduction to the last movement is little more than a scale being slowly stated, one extra note at a time with each repetition. The way Beethoven delivers such banal material makes this a very funny passage, yet once more Ling pushed through it without taking any time to play around, as plenty of other conductors do with that passage.

Not all of the performance was routine—the tempo in the second movement was faster than usual, but Ling made it work, without allowing the music to feel rushed. The scherzo (Beethoven marks it a minuet, but it’s really a scherzo) giddily jumped along, although this movement probably requires the least amount of interpretation in the symphony.

A final note: Welton Jones, who is probably more familiar with San Diego’s early cultural history than anyone else in town, and Melvin Goldzband, the Symphony’s archivist, both feel that 1910 was the first true season by any musical organization which called itself the San Diego Symphony. However, the distinguished musicologist Robert Stevenson in several articles for Inter-American Music Review (later summarized in the New Grove Dictionary of Music) pinpointed the first year of the Symphony as 1902, commencing with a performance of a 54-member group led by one of the prominent San Diego musicians at the turn of the twentieth century, R.E. Trognitz. This performance was documented by an announcement in the San Diego Union on January 30, 1902.

Could the origins of the San Diego Symphony lie even earlier than 1910? It is a question which merits further research.

For a copy of the program, click here.