Christian Baldini, director and conductor

Program

W. A. Mozart: Overture to Don Giovanni

Alejandro Civilotti: Auris (Cello Concerto), WORLD PREMIERE 
   with Eduardo Vassallo, principal cello of the 
   City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

Johann Strauss II: Overture to Die Fledermaus

Ludwig van Beethoven: Leonore Overture No. 3

$12 Students and Children / $24 Adults

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About the Program

As the title of the concert suggests (“From Vienna to Buenos Aires”), a listener could be sonically transported from Vienna in one era to Buenos Aires in nearly present times, with a little stop along the way in Prague.

Vienna. Both Beethoven and Strauss are celebrated composers who worked in Vienna, and Mozart spent the majority of his career in the capital. Beethoven’s Leonore No. 3 overture is so named as it was the third version written for his opera of the same name—although we now know it as Fidelio. Fidelio, by the way, is the name Leonore takes while in disguise and on a mission to rescue her husband, Florestan, from political persecution (in prison). Leonore No. 3 took on a life of its own and might explain why Beethoven settled on the fourth version, which is much less grand than the third.

Strauss’s overture to his comic opera Die Fledermaus (“The Bat”) opens with an explosion of energy and virtuosic orchestral playing. It later features one of Strauss’s favorite instruments, the oboe, and as we might expect from “The Waltz King,” the piece contains a proper Viennese waltz—the Schatzwalzer (“Treasure Waltz”).

Prague. Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni begins more ominously than his other popular overtures, such as Marriage of Figaro and Magic Flute. The overture begins with powerful D-minor chords, which capture the bravado that characterizes the epic story of Don Juan. Mozart wrote the overture in one night—the night before the opera’s premiere in Prague. Apparently he asked his wife to keep him up all night long with fantastical stories so he could complete the overture. 

Buenos Aires. Both the composer Alejandro Civilotti and the cello soloist Eduardo Vassallo are from Argentina, and, not to mention, the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra’s own director, Christian Baldini. Civilotti wrote Auris Concertum in 2001, and premiered at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 2009 with the same cello soloist the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra features in this performance. Vassallo is visiting from England, where he is principal cellist of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Civilotti is one of a second generation of contemporary Argentinian composers and now lives and teaches in Barcelona, Spain. The concerto is dedicated to Queen Sofía of Spain, one of Civilotti’s benefactors who intervened on behalf of the composer to get him a Cochlear implant in order to regain hearing he’d lost in his childhood years. 

The concerto is in fact part of a set of two, one for violin (Auris Resonantiam) and one for cello (Auris Concertum). The name “Auris” refers  to the journal Auris on Cochlear Implants of the García Ibáñez Foundation, which gave the composer his implants. The work opens with a solo cello cadenza, which reappears at different points of the piece as a memory, based on a motivic element built on resonances of a root pitch: B flat. What follow are harmonic frequencies in the composer’s “tinnitus,” which he has suffered from for many years. In the second movement the composer sets the soloist on an incredibly virtuosic path against a very dense orchestral backdrop. It was written to symbolize how difficult it might be for someone with hearing difficulties to understand individual voices in a crowded space.