The San Francisco Symphony’s annual gala opened its 2026-27 season with star power, virtuosity and plenty of celebration. But for all the clamorous response to violinist Hilary Hahn, the evening carried another, unmistakable subtext: anticipation for the orchestra’s next era.
Though a continent away, Music Director Designate Elim Chan was very present in her absence. When Board Chair Priscilla B. Geeslin alluded to her in a speech before the night’s concert on Thursday, Sept. 24, the excitement coursed through Davies Symphony Hall.
Still, if Chan represented the Symphony’s future, Hahn – along with guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero – embodied its present artistic strengths.
At the center of the Symphony’s Opening Night Gala concert was the Grammy-winning musician’s performance in Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. She unfurled the solo part in such a masterly, compelling way it was almost hard to register the individual expressive and technical component parts. Everything flowed, caught fire, breathed and beguiled as if the entire three-movement work were one gorgeous long musical sentence.
The violinist began working wonders at once, with her clear, warm voicing of the opening subject, which invited the orchestra to come along, in both mirroring and back-and-forth exchanges. Tempos were brisk but gently expansive. Guerrero and the Symphony musicians partnered her deftly and responsively.
Hahn’s passagework, double-stops and whirring tremolos came off with a blend of firmness and delicacy. She revealed details, like an uncanny repeated note in the midst of a busy flight across the strings, that made it seem she was playing catch with herself. (Note to rising violinists: Don’t try this at home.)
Violinist Hilary Hahn, left, and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero during the San Francisco Symphony Opening Gala concert at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026. (Heather Diehl/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Humor is one of her charms. At the start of the third movement, she tossed off the terse opening measures as impish little shrugs, then bore down on some accents with her distinctive tart-edged sound.
Played without pauses between movements, the concerto has one demanding long cadenza, a tender lyrical movement and a bucolic, bustling ending. The soloist and orchestra lit it all up.
In her cadenza, Hahn infused the furious bowing and plangent passages with a musing, elastic rubato. She brought an elegant restraint to the middle movement, which made it all the more affecting. With the woodwinds capering along, the performance rode home in larky affirmation.
A gentleman seated in the orchestra section bellowed “Encore! Encore!” while waving what looked like a white flag of surrender to the violinistic virtuosity. He surely wasn’t alone in craving more. Hahn obliged with a crystalline Gigue from J.S. Bach’s Partita No. 3.
Giancarlo Guerrero conducts the San Francisco Symphony during the Opening Gala concert at Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Sept. 24, 2026. The San Francisco Symphony’s Opening Gala is the Symphony’s biggest annual fundraising event. (Heather Diehl/For the S.F. Chronicle)
The concert opened with hometown hero John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances” (1985). Built on “out-takes” from the Berkeley composer’s celebrated opera “Nixon in China,” this infectious piece covers a lot of ground in 12 minutes. It chugged off with a pattering minimalist pulse that gave way to swooning Hollywood gushiness, then a prancing foxtrot and assorted other special effects. An ever-evolving rhythmic complexity kept the players, especially the percussionists, on their toes. The orchestra traversed it all admirably.
If the evening began with anticipation for the Symphony’s next era, it ended with a vivid reminder of why the Symphony has so much to look forward to.
Guerrero and the orchestra delivered a brawny performance of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio espagnole,” which reveled in the piece’s colorful solo turns. (A personal favorite: the harp and triangle going at it together.) Guerrero danced along on the podium, a fitting image for an orchestra with every reason to embrace what’s to come.
Steven Winn is a freelance writer. This article has been provided in partnership with San Francisco Classical Voice.
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This article originally published at San Francisco Symphony opens season with Hilary Hahn, Elim Chan buzz.