It’s hard to top the yen for adventure in Esa-Pekka Salonen. His latest effort for the San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox digressions-in-streaming is part concert, part music education, part alluring visuals, part dance, in part also recalling the famous Leonard Bernstein music lectures on TV of the 1960s, back when major commercial channels still had such cultural programs. This latest effort entitled, “Patterns,” is an imaginative foray into roots of minimalism spanning some 800 years of creativity, at times more an intellectual exercise than an entertainment.

Yes, I admit I try to keep minimalism to a minimum, much like local composer John Adams, that early practitioner. Yet I was blown away by Terry Riley’s all-too-familiar “In C” (1964) as played by a chamber orchestra, visually and sonically the finest performance of this historic work I’ve encountered. As annotator Salonen puts it, this is “The truly iconic piece that changed the history of music.” The greatly stripped-down notation gives the player or players wide latitude, akin to a traveler without passport driving all over North America, yet careful not to cross any frontiers.

Riley writes tiny segments of music in the key of C and lets musicians select which to play when, subject only to a modicum of guidance—just enough to avoid clashes and dissonance. It’s subtle, yet simple. The S.F. Symphony players bring it off neatly, placed before arresting projections of ambulatory crowds in silhouette created by designer Adam Larsen.

Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” (Mirror within Mirror) is a duo playing a slow-motion lullaby, so stripped down that first-year students of violin and piano could tackle it. It is fortunately amplified by a pair of extremely supple dancers doing a demanding modern ballet from Alonzo King’s inspiration, with formidable leg extensions. It’s a workable marriage of contrasts, given Pärt’s streamlining and King’s complexity of movement.

Salonen the conductor led a historic retrospective by Salonen the composer, entitled “Saltat sobrius” (Dance While Sober). This fantasy spotlighting orchestral strings gives a nod to arguably the earliest known classical composer, Pérotin (ca. 1155-1205), a truly obscure modal composer of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, a victim of the anonymity accorded to composers prior to the Renaissance. Pérotin helped launch (choral) polyphony from which all our harmonies later grew.

This is a bizarre linkage of music old and new, enabling us to hear these by Pérotin in his “Sederunt principes” as retailored into dance-like rhythms by Salonen, with a modern orchestra, at perhaps an overly generous length.

Oh, yes, instead of audiences clapping—the recording hall was unattended—we have musicians doing it without instruments in Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music,” another mid-20^th-century example of minimalism.

Both Riley and Reich, now octogenarians, came from the seminal mid-20^th-century creative triangle Berkeley-Oakland-San Francisco.

This imaginative 50-minute program is the maximum that can be pursued concert-wise in this era of pandemic restrictions. Choruses, full orchestra, and full house will have to wait till later. How later, no one can guess.

“Patterns,” the latest long-run SoundBox streaming concert curated by SFS Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, focusing on the evolution of minimalism, with assorted musicians and dancers from the Alonzo King Lines Ballet. Available through www.sfsymphonyplus.org.

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