Music director Jeffrey Kahane set the tone for his first season leading the San Antonio Philharmonic with two words. “Buenos días,” he said to a small crowd gathered Thursday morning at the philharmonic’s Promesa Building headquarters on West Guadalupe Street.
The crowd of classical music fans and supporters were in attendance for the orchestra’s festive announcement of its 2024-2025 season with Kahane at the helm.
The soft-spoken Los Angeles native proceeded with an introduction entirely in fluent Spanish, which he then translated into English as gratitude for “the realization of a dream that I have cherished for many, many years,” to lead an orchestra founded on ideals of justice and equality.
The Majestic Theatre
Kahane, along with the philharmonic’s executive director Roberto Treviño, president Brian Petkovich, and Avenida Guadalupe Association President and CEO Gabriel Velasquez, then unveiled a poster for Selena Vive: The Music of Selena, a series of concerts to be presented at the Majestic Theatre in June 2025.
Those concerts are one of more than a dozen classics, pops and special concerts and events scheduled starting in September and running into next summer. The philharmonic will perform seven concerts at the Majestic while continuing its tenure at the First Baptist Church of San Antonio.
For violinist Stephanie Westney, formerly of the San Antonio Symphony, performing at the Majestic amounts to a return, as the precursor symphony had regularly performed there prior to its residency at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.
Westney said she is excited to perform big orchestral pieces there, including the Jan. 17-18 program featuring violin soloist Augustin Hadelich. That program is themed for Dreamweek, featuring Adoration by Florence Price, whom Kahane called “a remarkable composer” and “a very important figure in the history of 20th-century music,” who had been overlooked because of her status as one of few African American composers.
The program pairs works by living composers Brian Raphael Nabors, Saad Haddad and Valerie Coleman with the classic composition Violin Concerto in D minor by Sibelius, honoring the season-long theme of combining “tradition and innovation in classical music,” as stated in the program.
New and old
The season opens Sept. 13-14 with Kauyumari by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz on a program featuring violin soloist and former San Antonian Nancy Zhou.
The October 18-19 program begins with Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Chokfi’, then proceeds through Concerto for Orchestra by 20th-century Polish composer Witold Lutosławski and two lively compositions by popular American composer George Gershwin.
The Jan. 31-Feb. 1 concerts feature Kahane’s onetime piano student Natasha Paremski performing works by Sofia Gubaidulina, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich.
The Feb. 21-22 program featuring guest conductor Lina Gonzalez-Granados places iconic classical composers Mendelssohn and Mozart in the first half of the program and living California composer Gabriela Lena Frank in the second half.
Featuring a lesser-known contemporary composition is an unusual inversion of traditional programming.
“It speaks for itself that I choose to place the trust in this public, this audience” that they will be enthusiastic to hear Frank’s work, Kahane said.
Known and performed regularly around the world, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor will be performed Nov. 16-17 at the Majestic with the San Antonio Mastersingers and former San Antonio tenor David Portillo.
The season’s grand finale will fill the Majestic Theatre with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, popularly known as the “Resurrection” symphony. Kahane said the symphony is appropriate not only “given the miraculous rising from the ashes of this orchestra,” but for the little-known fact that it contains a reference to the city’s namesake.
As he told the spellbound audience, “The third movement of this symphony is based on a song that Mahler wrote called ‘St. Anthony Preaching to the Fishes.’”
Bringing back Bach
Among season highlights will be a special series of concerts including Selena Vive, an expanded version of last December’s Folklórico Nutcracker and a Holy Week series at the Our Lady of the Lake University Chapel featuring the Easter Oratorio and Cantata No. 4 of J. S. Bach.
While the music of Bach has largely been relegated to ensembles performing on period instruments, Kahane said he sees no reason to exclude orchestras using modern instruments to perform compositions by “the fountainhead of Western classical music.”
Composers of the Baroque period in Mexico including Manuel de Zumaya and Ignacio de Jerusalem will also be on the program.
Kahane said he remains keen on keeping his piano chops by practicing daily. In a first for the philharmonic, he will present a recital in spring 2025 at the First Baptist Church of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a special benefit concert for the orchestra.
Other season events will include six weeks of Young People’s Concerts at various venues in school districts throughout the city, “Side-by-Side” concerts that seat student musicians of the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio next to philharmonic musicians in concert, and public concerts celebrating Dieciséis, Diwali and Cinco de Mayo in Hemisfair’s Civic Park and Plaza Guadalupe on the West Side.
Kahane’s last word of emphasis for the announcement was drawn from lyrics by German poet Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” the triumphant choral climax of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
“All,” Kahane said, explaining that each time the word is sung by the chorus, Beethoven emphasizes the word instrumentally to highlight his and Schiller’s belief in democratic equality.
Actually, Kahane’s last words of the announcement were not words at all. To close, he sat at the grand piano in the philharmonic’s new first-floor offices in the Promesa Building to play Mendellsohn’s Song Without Words, which received prolonged applause from the gathered throng.
Full information on the San Antonio Philharmonic’s 2024-2-25 season will be available next week on the orchestra’s website, Treviño said.
