It’s chill and starless in downtown San Antonio on symphony night. Just past the Express-News offices and across from the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, I arrive at the century-old First Baptist Church building. The ushers’ faces light up as the crowd arrives. I see mostly gray-haired Anglos filing in, though not entirely. The 1,200-seat sanctuary, domed and dotted with stained glass, fills up maybe 60 percent—prior performances nearly packed the house, I’m told—as around 65 musicians with the San Antonio Philharmonic warm up on stage.
The show tonight is not Beethoven or Mozart but a “pops” concert, a tribute to Martin Luther King including spirituals and renditions of King’s rhetoric. It’s been 11 days since the city’s annual MLK March, and renowned conductor Charles Floyd, one of few Black artists in his position, is in town to lead the show. Floyd guides the ensemble through works including the Afro-American Symphony, a 90-year-old composition ranging from jazzy to martial to tranquil. Cellists’ fingers fly like butterflies up fingerboards and violinists’ bows jab the air in unison. There’s little sign, to the untrained ear at least, that this is an orchestra lately snatched from the brink.
Launched in August 2022, the Philharmonic was previously known as the Musicians of the San Antonio Symphony Performance Fund, itself a makeshift group that put on performances last year while the 83-year-old Symphony Society of San Antonio—Texas’ longest-running professional orchestra—imploded. Following a nine-month labor strike by the symphony’s unionized musicians, the storied organization declared bankruptcy and dissolved last summer, raising the specter of San Antonio as America’s largest city without a symphony. The orchestra’s demise culminated decades of strife between the nonprofit’s workers and its board and management.
