The UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by music director and
conductor Christian Baldini, opens
its season with one of the more flashy openings in all of
the standard symphonic repertory. Strauss’s Don
Juan is a remarkable tour-de-force for the
entire orchestra. It is a 20-minute orchestral tone poem that
parallels the fictional story of Don Juan, which originated as
early as 1630 and inspired—among others—Mozart to write his opera
Don Giovanni.
Maestro Baldini is very fond of the music by Richard Strauss,
having conducted several of his tone poems in previous seasons.
“Strauss wrote Don Juan when he was only 24,
and this is considered a revolutionary piece in many ways, from
its great breadth of virtuosity to its cunning characterization
of different moments in the poem by Nikolaus Lenau, on which it
is based,” said Baldini. “I chose to pair one of the most
energetic, dramatic and poetic works of the symphonic literature
with two beautiful and very different concertos, which feature
the soloist in a very different way – from the exquisite
Romantic, lyrical vein of Rachmaninov, to the extraordinary and
imaginative sound world of Lutosławski.”
Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto is quintessentially Romantic;
tuneful as it is virtuosic. For all the piano soloist’s
dazzling passages, Rachmaninov wrote unforgettable melodies for
the strings. The piece’s success is one of the many reasons
Rachmaninov is remembered for his concertos more than his other
works. The soloist, Leyla Kabuli, is a
previous member of the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, albeit as a
violinist. She was for three seasons pianist of the prestigious
San Francisco Youth Orchestra, and is pursuing her undergraduate
degree at UC Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer
science as a Regent’s and Chancellor’s Scholar. Kabuli has
performed extensively on piano, including as a soloist with
several California symphony orchestras and on National Public
Radio’s program for accomplished young performers called “From
the Top.” She currently studies with Yoshikazu Nagai at the
San Francisco Conservatory of Music and
with Michael Seth Orland, who teaches at UC Berkeley and UC
Davis.
Sacramento-born violinist Maximilian
Haft performs the solo violin role
in Chain II. Lutosławski wrote
three major works late in his life by the name “Chain,”
which illustrates the musical idea in the composition that each
element overlaps and also sequences in a specific
order. Chain II is the most concerto-like of
the three, and at several points the orchestra reacts (at the
direction of the conductor), but not exactly in time. In this way
the work has the feeling of a dialogue. Max Haft recently he
performed Chain II with the Noord
Nederlands Orkest, which was well received. He performs with
several important contemporary ensembles in Europe, but also
plays jazz and pop music. He often performs with White
Hinterland, The Eef van Breen Group, and HHHJ, a group devoted to
splicing together chamber music and free jazz.
Robert & Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, Davis, CA
Two new string quartets by Taproot Festival
Participating Composers, a new quartet by
a UC Davis Graduate Student in Music,
and a new quartet by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir.
The ZOFO-MOMA Live Concert Experience unfolds as an aurally
and visually stunning walking tour through a virtual museum
of modern art. Against an ever-changing backdrop of contemporary
paintings, 15 new ZOFO-commissioned duet compositions are
revealed throughout the 72-minute continuous performance. And in
a nod to Mussorgsky, this twenty-first-century Pictures at an
Exhibition leads viewers from one gallery to the next
accompanied by a new “Promenade” Theme arranged by ZOFO’s Keisuke
Nakagoshi.
For this cutting-edge project, ZOFO solicited new works from
top composers around the globe—including UC Davis’s own
professor of music Pablo Ortiz—and requested
each to select a painting representative of his or her culture
as a springboard to the creative process. The result is a
rich tapestry of sights and sounds reflecting the cultural,
musical, and artistic diversity of our world community.
* The program runs 75 minutes and is presented without an
intermission. *
Barnabé Janin, tenor and director
Lise Viricel, soprano
Josquin Gest, countertenor
Benjamin Ingrao, tenor
Romain Bockler, baritone
Eric Chopin, bass-baritone
L’ensemble Coclico, founded in 2014, brings
together professional singers who specialize in
Renaissance and medieval music and improvisation. In concert, the
ensemble revives the improvised polyphonies of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, restoring to life the
organa, hymns, French chansons from the court of
Burgundy, motets, psalms, songs of the Renaissance, Italian
lauds, English carols, and more.
In a spirit musical and playful, as well as pedagogical,
the members of the ensemble share their enjoyment of
improvisation through concerts, spectacles and lectures with
musical illustrations.
At the boundary between any two ecosystems there exists an
abundance and variety of life. This holds true in art, where
the zone between two mediums contains great potential for
invention and expression.
