Event

UC Davis Symphony Orchestra: “Parisian Russians”
Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center

Christian Baldini, music director

Andrea Pestalozza, guest conductor

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…”

—D. Kern Holoman (Evenings with the Orchestra)

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. 

$10 Students & Children, $20 Adults | Standard Seating

Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, Davis, CA
Publication

Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat Major, op. 100
(from "Evenings with the Orchestra")

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.

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