Tchaikovsky & Friends End the San Diego Symphony's 2009 Outdoor Summer Pops Series

London has its Prom and Berlin has its Waldbühne. Here in San Diego, we have the Summer Pops concert series on the green lawn of the Embarcadero Marina Park - South where the San Diego Symphony and its guest conductors and solo artists liven up the enthusiastically casual crowd with classical tunes.

The 2009 Summer Pops series concluded its last show of the season Sunday evening with an all-Russian program that ranged from the rarely heard Overture on Three Russian Folk Songs by Balakirev, the first movement from Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, the 4th movement from Tchaikovsky's Mozartiana suite along with the Danse Cosaque from his rarely performed opera, Mazeppa, to the summer crowd's favorites like Tchaikovsky's Slavic March and 1812 Overture, properly highlighted with timed salvos of theatrical cannons and firework that succeeded in simultaneously startling more than a few audiences off their pants and punching holes through the rest's eardrums (thanks in no small measure to the additional brass from the US Navy Band Southwest).

Aside from the program line up the Saturday night audience was also treated to impromptu addition of 2 selections from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake suite guest-conducted by the young local music student, Saul Garcia, courtesy of one of the series' community-minded corporate sponsors. The youngster gamely paced the San Diego Symphony through the Dance of the Swans before turning the baton back to the summer series' principal guest conductor, Matthew Garbutt (who publicly turned 44 yrs old before the Saturday night audience).

I must confess to not being familiar with the Balakirev and the Rachmaninov selections, and found the former's use of Russian folk songs quite interesting. The Rachmaninov... will likely grow on me. It's something of a neo-classical piece with a lovely dialog between the alto saxophone and the oboe sandwiched between the weirdly liltingly dissonant opening and finish... that sounds more made for piano than for a full orchestra (but then Rachmaninov was a rather piano-oriented composer).

The concertmaster, Jeff Thayer, proves one smooth violin virtuoso, though I sort of wish he had accented and varied his dynamic a bit more in his solo during a variation in Tchaikovsky's Mozartiana. He made the touchy passages sound so easy to play that the thing almost became boring (almost, but not quite)... and that... isn't quite Slavic.

The US Navy Band SW marched onto the stage just as the firework started to go off a bit ahead of the climax of the delightfully bombastic 1812 Overture (nothing to do with our War of 1812, mind you, but depicting how Napoleon got that Russian boot shaped bruise imprinted on his butt during that very cold winter nearly 200 years ago).

As bad as the economy has been this year, it was good to see such a good turn out for the final weekend of the Summer Pops concerts. There was hardly any vacant seat on the Grand Stand and even in the pricier tables closer to the stage. The symphony is going back indoor for the remainder of the year and is planning on a star-studded 2010-11 season when it will celebrate its 100th anniversary. Anyone planning on attending the symphony next year has better buy their tickets early or the good seats will be vanishing a la Scarlet O'Hara...