Read a detailed article about “Parisian Russians” in the
Davis Enterprise. For more information about about our
guest conductor, visit Andrea
Pestalozza.
Andrea Pestalozza has worked directly with the most
recognized modern Italian composers, including
Berio, Nono, and Sciarrino—with whom Pestalozza also
studied composition. Pestalozza is a pianist and percussionist,
but has made a career conducting contemporary works, including
those by Kurtág, Takemitsu, and others. He has conducted the
Berlin Philharmonic’s Scharoun Ensemble, the Israel Contemporary
Players, the Musik Fabrik Ensemble (Stuttgart, Germany), and
many orchestras—including the Radio Symphony Orchestras of
both Saarbrücken and Budapest.
Stravinsky: Scherzo à la russe
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) is perhaps best known for
his work that he wrote for the ballet producer Sergei Diaghilev,
from Firebird (1910) to the Rite of Spring
(1913). Following the First World War, Stravinsky spent time in
Switzerland and then Paris, becoming a French citizen, and then,
later, he moved to the United States. Stravinsky wrote two
stand-alone scherzos for orchestra: the Scherzo
fantastique (1909) and the Scherzo à la russe
(1946), each from very different periods in his life. Written a
few short years after immigrating to Hollywood, the
Scherzo à la russe was originally meant to accompany a
film with a Russian backdrop. After the film efforts fell
through, Stravinsky orchestrated the Scherzo à la
russe for the Paul Whiteman Band as a symphonic jazz
piece for radio broadcast. Stravinsky himself eventually
conducted a fully orchestrated version—the same version the UC
Davis Symphony Orchestra will perform—on March 22, 1946, by the
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Koussevitzky: Double Bass Concerto
with Thomas Derthick, double bass
Sergei Koussevitzky (1874–1951) “studied in
Moscow, where he became a virtuoso double bass player and
established his credentials as a conductor. He left Russia in
the wake of the Revolution, arriving in the United States after
a spectacularly successful series of concerts in Paris in the
early 1920s. . . . Moreover the publishing house he and
his wife founded, Éditions Russes de Musique, was a
major force in the dissemination of the music of Rachmaninov,
Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and the other Russians…”
Thomas Derthick,
double bass, is known to audiences in the central
valley as the conductor of the Central Valley Youth Symphony, and
to Sacramento and Davis audiences as a principal of the
Sacramento Philharmonic, in addition to his teaching duties at
both UC Davis and the University of the Pacific Conservatory of
Music.
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat Major
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) today is best known for works
that include Peter and the Wolf (1936), the
“Classical Symphony” (1916), Lieutenant
Kije (1934), and Romeo and Juliet (1936). He
wrote seven symphonies and his Fifth Symphony is easily the most
popular. The premiere took place early in 1945 alongside
Peter and the Wolf and the “Classical Symphony,” and won
him widespread recognition.
Prokofiev’s decision to return to the Soviet Union, taken
sometime in the early 1930s, was motivated not so much by
ideology—though he thought he could live with Soviet policies,
and managed pretty well—but by the altogether understandable
desire to go home. Sojourns in the USSR from December 1932 led
finally to his resettling permanently with his wife and family in
Moscow in 1936. For a time Prokofiev maintained his international
mobility, despite the Soviet’s cultural isolation in those years.
But his 1938 tour of Europe, England, and the United States was
his last. Thereafter his circumstances changed radically, due
partly to the evacuation of artists from Moscow at the beginning
of the war, partly to the decline of his health after a series of
heart attacks, and partly to a liaison with the young
woman Mira Mendelson, who became his companion for the rest
of his life. Prokofiev’s wife, a Spanish soprano who called
herself Lina Llubera, was eventually sent to a concentration camp
and later, in 1976, allowed to immigrate to the United States.