Montero and Marin Are a Hit at Davies Symphony Hall

In the 1990s, the freestyle rapper Supernatural had a routine that always won over the club. He’d solicit suggestions for words or phrases from the audience, or even items from rap fans’ pockets or purses, and then tell the DJ to drop the beat. Three minutes of complex wordplay would follow, all tightly in rhythm, involving the crowd’s suggestions. It killed.

On Thursday night, the pianist Gabriela Montero brought this approach into the classical concert hall. As an encore to her piano concerto, she asked patrons at Davies Symphony Hall for a melody upon which she could improvise. A few loudly sung suggestions followed: Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

I didn’t recognize the winning melody, but Montero plunked it out on the piano a few times, thought it over for a few seconds, and then launched into a dazzling improvisation — something like Louis Moreau Gottschalk, with more meat on its bones — that lasted several minutes and inspired the crowd to its feet.

Improvisation in music is a gooey concept. What, really, is pre-written, and what is the performer’s input? Is some improvisation planned beforehand? Isn’t soloing in jazz, as the saxophonist Gary Bartz once told me, “composing all the time” rather than “improvising”? Is a singer’s particular phrasing of a lyric improvisation?

Within the relative rigidity of classical music, Montero is an outlier. I’ve heard other improvisations-as-encores (speaking of gooey, Jeffrey Kahane’s “America the Beautiful,” played just after 9/11, comes to mind), but they’ve been preordained to some degree. With Monerto, her style, filigree and technique may all be prepared tools of construction, but I have to believe the blueprint was spontaneous.

It was a highlight of a program of music from Mexico, Venezuela and the United States, conducted by Marin Alsop. Highly decorated worldwide, Alsop is especially loved in the Bay Area for her 25 years as director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz. Understandably, then, the best moments of Thursday’s concert involved new works.

Gabriela Ortiz’s Antrópolis led things off, sounding like a Martin Denny album from the late 1950s: a repetitive bass line, triplets on the wood block, vibraphone, a wooden fish güiro. Upon this Polynesian foundation, the strings and brass rose and collapsed, not as batty as Juan García Esquivel, but tilting in that direction. The brass had some timing issues in the faster sections (this is not music of most of the musicians’ native land), but the crowd ate it up.

Speaking before Montero performed her own Piano Concerto No. 1, Alsop quipped of Montero that “she’s always complaining that the composer wrote too many notes.” I may have to agree. To the extent that there is a melody in the first movement, a mambo, it was hidden beneath a constant thrum of fingers-as-pistons, churning the engine along. A second movement replaced the pistons with arpeggios, but the third brought back the busywork on the keys. For all its impressive technique, I could barely notice the congas and maracas, let alone Montero’s intention to show the malevolence and corruption of her home country of Venezuela. Is it possible for a piano concerto to flood the zone?

Levity was found in the second half opener, a pairing of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man with, hilariously, Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman — the latter dedicated to and conducted by Alsop. Whereas Copland’s Olympic games staple trumpets mankind’s entrance and loudly announces his importance, the “uncommon woman” in Tower’s fanfare furtively sidles her way into the proceedings and usurps them from within. The pairing was welcome.

It was also the moment I realized that this program was alive with things we don’t ordinarily get at the symphony: audience participation, Latin rhythms, improvisation, humor. (I also couldn’t help but hear it in contrast to the San Francisco Symphony’s upcoming season, disappointingly heavy on tried-and-true repertoire.)

And at its peaks, the night contained one more element. In the Andante tranquillo section of Samuel Barber’s Symphony No. 1, the oboe solo led to a moving climax, during which Alsop ceased her demands from the orchestra and allowed herself to become engulfed in that simple, unexplainable thing: beauty.

‘Alsop Conducts Music of the Americas’ with the San Francisco Symphony repeats on Friday, April 11 and Saturday, April 12 at Davies Symphony Hall. Details here.