The San Francisco Symphony opener under new maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen was novel, modern, and unique, certainly unlike any in over half a century of this writer’s memory and attendance. He featured rousing and in part explosive music, none of it familiar, all from 1939 or later. And the performance earned several standing ovations. The patrons’ enthusiasm over the unencumbered reopening of Louise Davies Hall after a year and a half was palpable.

Some spoil-sports will grouse about the lack of National Anthem, the flag, and beloved old Americana favorites. Others will bristle at the glitzy 500-plus dancing lights on stage, perhaps a throwback to the Finn’s former Los Angeles tenure. But folks: Give him some slack!

Salonen threw down the gauntlet in his first indoor S.F. opening night to start his second season: No totally predictable, business-as-usual symphony programs, but rather diversity, mind-stretching, and visceral stimuli. The audience went along, quite unpredictably, with vim and vigor, responding to a live on-stage ballet, a lengthy jazz piece with solo vocalist, an Adams modernism, a notable Latino component, and a dozen percussionists running wild.

And for once there was no mad dash at the last cadence to rush to the after-party and “nosh pit” eateries in Lake Louise. And, significantly, the audience for the gala had shifted, on average a good two decades younger than in past years, with greater participation by the black community, drawn in part by a Black choreographer (Alonzo King) and composer (Wayne Shorter).

The initial reaction suggested that conductor-composer Salonen was an adroit choice to succeed the retired MTT (still out of action on sick leave) in being bold and innovative, selecting dissimilar vectors to MTT’s.

If the hall’s roof was blown off, credit the nimble dozen SFS percussionists playing up a storm in Silvestre Revueltas’ 1939 “Night of Enchantment” excerpt. Somewhat influenced by Stravinsky’s unbridled “Rite of Spring,” it was an 11-minute virtuoso tour, supplemented by a wind player blowing on a conch shell, reminiscent of Mesoamerica’s pre-Columbian music.. Revueltas falls into a group of creative composers felled in mid-career, alongside Bizet, Schubert, Mozart, and Mendelssohn.

Star power came from the lower-case, but ever-high-quality, esperanza spalding, a bona fide double threat on contrabass (here, lamentably inaudible) and soprano voice. This soulful jazz stylist is a space rocket when it comes to flying above the staff vocally on a rarified stratus few can emulate. Her virtuosity, with melismas to die for, compensated for her long-winded excerpt from Wayne Shorter’s “Gaia” wherein the solo jazz quartet achieved far more than the lumbering orchestral parts performed behind them.

The whole large orchestra was pushed several feet upstage—watch those flying elbows, violinists!—to accommodate the dance floor for Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, set to the “Estancia” Suite of the late Argentinian Alberto Ginastera, one of our notably neglected New World composers. Apart from two flamboyant male solos, King hewed to modern ballet for his nine dancers—masked, like the audience—in his reserved creation of movement.

The night’s high energy was enkindled by John Adams’ 1993 “Slonimsky’s Earbox,” 17 minutes of fiery effusiveness. His wild ride featured upward-streaming runs, like champagne bubbles, and an unusual orchestra—four trumpets, no less, allowing scant space on the cramped stage for, say, cellos and basses. This was high energy in spades produced by the Berkeley composer.

The title’s Earbox refers to Adams’ box of musical phrases and gestures from which he could draw for this tribute to the polymath Russian-American musician/encyclopedist Nikolai Slonimsky.

MUSIC NOTES—“Lake Louise” is now a semi-official designation for the parking lot adjoining the concert hall adapted Oct. 1 into a temporary party site. Originally that was a quip resulting from that depressed lot which flooded on a half-forgotten rain-washed winter, a situation devoutly to be wished for these dry, dry days!….Ms. spalding is one of Salonen’s eight innovative “collaborating partners,” all of them highly gifted musicians.

San Francisco Symphony’s opening concert and gala Oct. 1 replayed the next night, Davies Symphony Hall, S.F. For further SFS info: 415-864-6000, or go online: www.sfsymphony.org.

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