Violinist Simone Porter exudes positive energy, from the confident way she takes the stage to her welcoming manner as she delivers insightful remarks to an audience. She was absolutely the perfect choice to lead New Century Chamber Orchestra in a weeklong teaching encounter with students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Those students were clearly concentrating hard as they joined NCCO in a Saturday night concert at the Conservatory’s Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall. They acquitted themselves well, though observing them from the auditorium was a reminder that fitting into an orchestra, even if you’re a great musician, is really challenging. Performing in two separate groups, the 10 junior players were listening and taking cues from standmates while navigating a range of styles. You could almost see their brains getting bigger. And there were excited smiles and exchanges afterward as the students left the stage, confidence and musicianship boosted.
Porter’s mission, of course, was not just to deliver for the students but to curate a concert experience for an audience that is by now used to the adventurous, broad-based repertory choices of NCCO’s music director, Daniel Hope.
Mission accomplished, one would have to say. The musical numbers, all of them relatively short, so that student stage time could be distributed among several pieces, were collected under Porter’s punning concert title, “Enlighten Me.”
The post-intermission flow captures the spirit of the whole. Hildegard von Bingen’s “O virtus sapientiae” (O strength of wisdom), heard in an arrangement, flowed into Juhi Bansal’s Cathedral of Light (2020), a work that uses its five minutes well, with captivating melodies and a striking variety of timbre.
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s reputation as a violinistic weirdo is only furthered in Battalia (1673), am entertaining 10-minute piece that, despite its title, only spends a minute and a half depicting a battle and is mostly comic rather than dark. On first listen, you’re struck by its unusual effects. In one movement, the bassist slides a piece of paper beneath the instrument’s strings to dampen the sound. In another, members of the orchestra split up and play different tunes, each in a separate key, making an effect that anticipates the music of Charles Ives. Biber also uses left-hand pizzicato (plucking the string on the fingerboard) and col legno bowing (turning the bow over and striking the strings with its wood). Yeah, this guy could have hung with the art-house crowd in 1920s Berlin.
The whole concert was topped off by a spirited, dancing account of Mozart’s Divertimento in F Major, K. 138. Here, and throughout, NCCO’s trademark full-bodied sound and superb articulation resulted in performances that glowed with their own light. Porter’s propulsive tempos and added heft from the students made it an exciting finale that lifted the audience out of the seats.
Porter, a 29-year-old Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, has been on the concert scene since 2013, has seen her career flourish in the last several years. She already has major debuts and a solo album under her belt (a recording named ad tendo, speaking of puns, which is well worth a listen), and a packed calendar for 2026. Her performance of J.S. Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major, BWV 1042, showed off her solo chops perfectly. There was striving and passion in the way she attacked the first-movement allegro, yet that was balanced with poise in the way she listened to her colleagues and connected with them. Her violin sang effortlessly in the second movement, the phrasing and articulations not interrupting the flow of the line. She is a great match for this orchestra.
