Event Date
Event Date
Location
Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
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Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
This program draws from a century of American composers who continue to envision what symphonic music can be and what sources it can draw from. In her Gaelic Symphony, Amy Beach made use of Irish melodies — and included the melody of her own original song "Dark is the Night" — in what was the first symphony composed and published by a female American composer.
Program
- Chris Castro: New Work, commissioned by the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra
- Selection to be announced with the winner of the 2026 UC Davis Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition
- Amy Beach: Symphony in E Minor (“Gaelic”)
Tickets
- Adult $30
- Faculty and Staff $27 [ 10% off the top price ]
- Children 18 and Under / Non-UC Davis Students $17
- Students at UC Davis $13
About the Composers
Chris Castro is a composer and double bassist from Brooklyn, New York, and Assistant Professor of Music at Chapman University. He is a recipient of Chamber Music America's 2021 Classical Commissioning Award, where one of the jurors described his music as "On par with Varèse," giving him the nickname "The New Colossus of Sounds." Castro has a Ph.D. in composition and theory from UC Davis, and a bachelor's in Music from the Juilliard School in both double bass and composition.
Amy Beach (1867–1944) was a largely self-taught American composer and pianist who became the first American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. Her “Gaelic” Symphony (1896), written partly in response to Dvořák's call for American composers to draw on folk material, wove Irish folk melodies into a large-scale Romantic symphonic form.