Santa Rosa Symphony’s 2023-24 season starts this weekend

Francesco Lecce-Chong is entering his sixth season as music director of the Santa Rosa Symphony. But at this point, the rising young conductor, 36, already has transformed into a well-seasoned artist forged by time and adversity.

“I have grown so much that I feel like a very different music director now than I was six years ago,” said Lecce-Chong, who helped guide the orchestra through the sticky wicket of the pandemic, beginning when his second season — 2019-2020 — was cut short. “I have gotten to know the orchestra and the community and myself so much more. ... This feels like a second beginning, to be honest.”

Last season was the first complete season Lecce-Chong conducted in Santa Rosa since taking over the orchestra in the 2018-2019 season. When the pandemic hit, the music director often had to pivot from concert to concert, especially in January 2022, when the Omicron variant was wreaking havoc on the health of the orchestra musicians.

“It was a scary time,” he recalled. “We had the Saturday concert with (pianist) Olga Kern, then Sunday morning rolls around and I find out we can only have a string orchestra.”

To keep the ball rolling, Lecce-Chong and Kern threw together an impromptu program on Sunday that was part piano recital and part piano with chamber orchestra. The following day, they decided to scale back even further and presented a salon-style concert with just three people: Kern, Lecce-Chong and his wife, harpist Chloe Tula.

As a result, however, only one-third of the symphony’s audience was able to hear Kern perform with the full orchestra that weekend. Lecce-Chong wanted to remedy that by bringing Kern back to begin the 2023-2024 season this weekend at Weill Hall. She will perform Grieg’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and present a recital at the symphony’s annual fundraising gala Friday night.

“At the end of the day, Olga brought us goodwill,” Lecce-Chong said. “And I wanted to have her back soon enough that we could remember and celebrate the gift.”

Kicking off the season

This weekend’s program opens with Tchaikovsky’s Polonaise from the lyric opera “Eugene Onegin,” followed by “From the Northern Wilds,” a 10-minute work by contemporary composer Michael Djupstrom. The symphony will premiere Djupstrom’s Symphony No. 1 in March.

In this shorter work, premiered by the Great Falls Symphony Orchestra of Great Falls, Montana, in 2019, Djupstrom follows the Missouri River’s course from its headwaters at a Montana spring to its confluence with the mighty Mississippi in St. Louis.

The work weaves together two themes — the natural flow of the river and the interference of humans who have harnessed the river’s energy along its 2,300-mile length. The two themes often come into conflict but blend together beautifully at the climax.

“He’s just an incredible artist, and people connect with his music immediately,” Lecce-Chong said. “And of course, the orchestra and I get to tackle Sibelius’ (Symphony) No. 2, which is the first one I’ll conduct here. It’s an important style for an orchestra to work on.”

Also during the 2023-2024 season, Lecce-Chong will serve his final season as the official music director of the Eugene Symphony Orchestra in Eugene, Oregon, a post he has held since 2017.

“Having both orchestras for the past five years has allowed me to gain experience at double the rate,” he said. “In a sense, I’ve gained 10 years of experience over that time.”

He will return to Eugene next year to ensure a smooth transition as that orchestra selects his successor. But he won’t have to worry about any administrative responsibilities. Instead, Lecce-Chong said, he will be able to devote himself to the artistic and administrative needs of the symphony here with the help of its new president and CEO, J. Andrew Bradford.

“The energy and understanding he brings to our industry is more important than ever right now,” Lecce-Chong said of Bradford. “Certainly the industry has changed a lot since COVID, and Andrew brings fresh ideas and momentum.”

It’s no secret that arts organizations across the country are still struggling to regain the audience numbers they had before the pandemic. But Lecce-Chong believes it’s a mistake for the industry to want to return to those days, when everyone was barely treading water.

“I think it should be an opportunity for us to try new things,” he said. “I’m really thrilled to see how we grow over the coming years.”

New season highlights

Here is a summary of the other six programs of the 2023-2024 Classical Series season, plus one special concert in June 2024 that’s part of the orchestra’s launch of its “Road to 100” centennial celebration.

Nov. 4-6: Lecce-Chong conducts an exciting program that will be part of The California Festival, a month-long initiative spearheaded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and the San Diego Symphony to highlight new music and orchestral innovation.

The program opens with Giovanni Gabrieli’s Two Canzoni for Brass and ends with Mahler’s “Titan” Symphony No. 1. In between, the orchestra will give a world premiere of Brazilian-American composer Clarice Assad’s “Play!” performed by the Grammy award-winning Third Coast Percussion ensemble.

“This piece is almost like a narrated and sung story, and Clarice will be singing and narrating this concert,” he said. “The four percussionists play a massive assortment of toy instruments ... all these little drums and whistles and squeaky pigs. Somehow she puts it all together, and they don’t sound like toy instruments.”

Dec. 2-4: Conducting from the harpsichord, Lecce-Chong will lead the orchestra and the SSU Symphonic Chorus in Handel’s “Messiah” in its entirety, with a few edits and cuts. This is the first time in 20 years the symphony will perform the traditional holiday work. The Green Music Center usually presents a performance during its season, but this year they are taking a break.

Lecce-Chong has led the oratorio so many times that he’s crafted his own version over the years, with help from his mentors. It includes improvisations from the keyboard and an emphasis on telling the story in all its “joy and anger and darkness.”

“I bring the soloists on and off the stage, so it feels less static,” he said. “It’s a pacing thing. I never let things just stop. ... I divide it into large sections so things happen continuously.”

Jan. 20-22, 2024: The symphony will unveil the third episode of its four-year project, “Rach & the Hollywood Sound,” with Rachmaninoff’s colorful Symphony No. 3 paired with three film scores: 1960’s “Psycho,” 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia” and 1993’s “Schindler’s List” featuring Concertmaster Joseph Edelberg.

“Each of the films is completely different,” Lecce-Chong said. “I wanted to show how all these incredible composers are able to conjure up a place or a setting or a character.”

Feb. 17-19, 2024: The return of Conductor Emeritus Jeffrey Kahane as guest conductor features Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 and “Primal Message,” a curtain opener by violist/composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama. Before intermission, Kahane will conduct from the keyboard for Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 for Piano and Orchestra, a signature work that he performed during the symphony’s inaugural concert in Weill Hall in 2012.

“I’m very excited because my first time as assistant (conductor) to Jeffrey at the Milwaukee Symphony, he played Beethoven’s Fourth,” Lecce-Chong said. “It’s still to this day one of the most incredible concerts.”

March 23-25, 2024: Old chestnuts roast next to contemporary works in this program featuring Ravel’s “Bolero” and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto performed by Geneva Lewis alongside Djupstrom’s Symphony No. 1, the fourth and final installment of the First Symphony Project.

Rounding out the new music roster is Icelandic composer Hildur Gudnadottir’s “Folk Faer Andlit (People Get Faces)” for String Orchestra, which features a full section of strings onstage plus six players who perform a chant.

“Over COVID, I became very interested in her music, and I like keeping up with her,” Lecce-Chong said. “It’s a very haunting work, and she wrote it to bring awareness to the refugee.”

May 11-13, 2024: For the centennial of George Gershwin’s groundbreaking “Rhapsody in Blue,” the symphony under Lecce-Chong will present the original version of the work performed by pianist Conrad Tao accompanied by three saxophones, banjo, eight violins and one bass player.

After Lecce-Chong heard Tao play a jazzy yet modern piece from the Gershwin songbook, he asked him to tackle the original arrangement to celebrate the centennial of “Rhapsody in Blue” with the Santa Rosa Symphony.

“Since that piece, no one has ever written for that ensemble because it’s so strange,” Lecce-Chong said. “It’s a crazy assortment. ... We’re going back to that raw, wild, untamed version.”

The pianist also agreed to write a new work he could play himself with the same array of players. The result is the world premiere of Conrad Tao’s Concerto for Piano and Jazz Band. The jazz-driven concert kicks off with Gershwin’s Catfish Row: Symphonic Suite from “Porgy and Bess” and ends with Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige” — Suite for Orchestra.

June 9, 2024: To kick off the symphony’s own centennial celebration coming up in 2027-2028, a “Road to 100” special concert will feature Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.” The orchestra plans to present all nine Beethoven symphonies over the next five years, culminating with Beethoven’s 9th during its centennial season.

“We’ve done a lot of Beethoven since I got here, and I want to celebrate the artistic vibrancy of what this orchestra is right now,” Lecce-Chong said. “We’ll be seating the orchestra in European style, with the violins split across the stage and the basses in the back — the idea being that the (Green Music Center) is the perfect hall for Beethoven.”