This concert is guest conducted by Matilda Hofman, features
Guyanese American soprano Shawnette Sulker — acclaimed for her
“heart-breaking poignancy” by the San Francisco Chronicle
— and has on it three works that will demonstrate the UC
Davis Symphony Orchestra’s ability to present compelling music
by a variety of composers.
The program opens with Yu-Hui
Chang’s Pixelandia, a 2015 multi-movement work
inspired by the joy of first-wave 2D video games, “with graphics
so primitive that every scan line and pixel was visible.” Music
and video-game enthusiasts will be delighted to learn that the
third movement is where one meets the “Boss” and that the tempo
marking before the last movement is “Insert coin to continue.”
The other two pieces on the program are by twentieth-century
American composers Florence Price and Samuel Barber. Price’s
music didn’t enjoy the same successes as Barber’s did “on account
of [her] sex and race.” Her Third Symphony in C Minor was funded
by a Works Progress Administration (WPA) grant and was first
performed in 1940, Michigan. First Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt was in attendance, but the work remained
unperformed until 2001 when the Women’s Philharmonic in San
Francisco recorded it. The work interweaves mid-century modernist
music techniques with African dance rhythms and themes.
Barber’s Knoxville uses a poem by James Agee,
sung by soprano and orchestra. The work is a musical picture of a
summer’s day in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915, in which a boy
lays in a field listening to the sounds around him. This
performance features Guyanese American soprano Shawnette Sulker,
acclaimed for her “heart-breaking poignancy” by the San Francisco
Chronicle. Knoxville was last performed at the
Mondavi Center by Christine Brewer and the UC Davis Symphony
Orchestra in 2009 for the Barbara K. Jackson Rising Stars of
Opera program.
