Friday afternoon, before I left home to go down to Embarcadero Marina Park South to attend the San Diego Symphony’s season-opening Pops Concert, I was reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s current account of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Describing that orchestra’s summer outdoor concerts in varying venues across the borough, Ross focused on one in Bedford-Stuyvesant that he described as “an avant garde hip-hop pops concert” that featured guest performers Leslie Uggams and hip-hop artist Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def). Although Ross did not proclaim every moment of that concert as thrilling, he clearly approved of the direction…