A minority conductor on the way up and a provocative modern program of novelties were the hallmarks of this week’s bracing San Francisco Symphony concerts. I’m happy to look past their bizarre whack-a-mole adaptation of “Carmen” music, as the night’s positives outweighed that musical aberration.

The musical gem of the night was Carlos Simon’s six-minute “An Elegy: A Cry from the Grave” (2015). This is a thoroughly moving, aphoristic and harmonious statement emphasizing the low strings. Simon had been motivated by the senseless shooting of Trayvon Martin and others by security guards. But he went beyond politics in fashioning music to remember, overflowing with the sense of loss and contemplation, exquisitely rendered by the SFS strings under conductor Joseph Young.

The program remainder on June 4 was made up of impressions of much earlier works, like images glimpsed through glass vases. Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner” is a vigorous modern invention inspired obliquely by our National Anthem. Here and there you could catch snippets of “In the Land of the Free” and “The Flag Was Still There.” But the 10-minute work emphasized new material for the contemporary listener (while moving away from texts by F.S. Key, now a disputed poet saddled by accusations of racism).

The 38-year-old Montgomery used a concerto-grosso format, offsetting a string quintet against the other 17 orchestra strings in her 10-minute piece. Her style is marked by vigorous and even raucous bowing, plus fast-shifting rhythms. Her break with the past was underlined by vigorous strokes of a solo viola, as if it were a wake-up call to us all. Extremes abound, and entice the ear, as when the ensemble becomes pillow-soft, barely audible. And it is emphatically modern with finger taps struck on the basses and even some stamping of feet.

Both composers, like the conductor, are African-American, and both have wrestled with contemporary politics filtering into symphonic music (an element played down in well-chosen remarks by the ever-discreet conductor).

Young gave a very strong impression leading the group, cueing conscientiously, and evoking a strong spectrum of sound as musicians were summoned to perform above and beyond what is widely known as “classical music.” The whole evening was music full of bear traps for a conductor, but, like an accomplished chef, he strove to put into perspective all the ingredients: the modern, the historic, the musical, the political.

Then there was the whack-a-mole music, an oddity created for Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, which never shied away from vehement statements, either in choreography or in its music. Rodion Shchedrin’s 1967 recasting of Bizet’s “Carmen” music features strings plus five added percussionists providing resounding blows—fortissimo statements—marring the delicacies of the original opera score. Well, the boombastic Bolshoi was never famed for subtlety. Almost as jarring was the scrambling of the music out of sequence, putting Micaela’s music as well as the tenor aria “The Flower That You Threw to Me” toward the end, presumably to fit the choreographer’s needs.

As one wag phrased it, “If Bizet were alive today, he’d be turning over in his grave.”

This visceral modernist’s approach to “Carmen” runs on for 45 minutes, with an unbalanced score that only a percussion devotee could truly love. But the unusual scoring did show off the stellar SFS mallet ensemble confined to the back row. The quintet played close to a dozen instruments including timpani, bass drum and snare drum, all capped by principal Jacob Nissly flawlessly performing the opera’s rapid-fire opening theme converted to a xylophone solo. When you get polished performances like that, letting the percussion run wild is tolerable, especially from the perspective of patrons who applauded it, but warily.

MUSIC NOTES—Young was a surprise winner picked as music director of the Berkeley Symphony some three years ago. He was an emergency replacement for one of Berkeley’s M.D. finalists when the latter had to withdraw. He filled in so ably that he was voted into the dream podium slot while continuing as a Peabody Conservatory faculty member in Baltimore. He is in that array of established minority conductors in the area, including the Oakland Symphony’s Michael Morgan (slated also to lead the SFS this summer) and the Santa Rosa Symphony’s Francesco Lecce-Chong.

S.F. Symphony strings and percussion in modern program of Montgomery, Simon, and the Bizet-Shchedrin “Carmen Suite” under Joseph Young heard June 4, Davies Hall, S.F. For SFS info: (415) 864-6000, or go online: www.sfsymphony.org

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