Tag: Composer

Observing the WWI Armistice Centennial

Music Director Donato Cabrera writes from Linz, Austria, on a day commemorating the end of World War One.

The announcing of the armistice on November 11, 1918, was the occasion for large celebrations in the allied nations.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day — Veterans Day in the U.S.— commemorating the end of WWI, which ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11 month of the year. It was a devastating war and the world of classical music suffered greatly from this incredibly barbaric conflict.

It was not too long ago that every schoolchild in the U.S. recited John McCrae’s, In Flanders Fields, for Veteran’s Day:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

WWI Composers

George Butterworth was a promising English composer who was killed at the Battle of the Somme at the age of 31. His body was never found. His song-cycle, A Shropshire Lad, is probably his most famous composition:

Rudi Stephan was a promising German composer whose small body of work is also excellent and quite varied in genre. He died at the age of 28 in Tarnopol at the Galician Front. Here is a very compelling piece he wrote in 1910 called, Music for Orchestra:

There were many composers who survived WWI but who were deeply affected by it. Each movement of the incredible six-movement piano piece, Le Tombeau de Couperin, by Maurice Ravel is a remembrance of a friend who lost their life in WWI:

And in one of the greatest examples of creating opportunity out of a seemingly hopeless situation, the pianist Paul Wittgenstein — brother of famed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein — lost his right arm in WWI. After the war, he spent the rest of his life commissioning the world’s greatest composers to write pieces for piano for the left hand. Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, Erich Korngold, Sergei Prokofiev, Franz Schmidt, and Richard Strauss, among others, all obliged but it is Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand that is the most famous:

The two pillars of English composition, Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams, both wrote works in memorium of the Great War. Vaughan Williams’s Symphony №3 is very touching and Elgar’s Cello Concerto has become one of the staples of the genre:

I’ve created a Spotify playlist as well:

https://bit.ly/DCWWI

ABOUT DONATO CABRERA

Donato Cabrera is the Music Director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and served as the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and the Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009-2016.

Since Cabrera’s appointment as Music Director of the California Symphony in 2013, the organization has reached new artistic heights by implementing innovative programming that emphasizes welcoming newcomers and loyalists alike, building on its reputation for championing music by living composers, and committing to programming music by women and people of color. With a recently extended contract through the 2022–23 season, Cabreracontinues to advise and oversee the Symphony’s music education programs and community engagement activities. Cabrera has also greatly changed the Las Vegas Philharmonic’s concertexperience by expanding the scope and breadth of its orchestral concerts. Cabrera has also reenergized the Youth Concert Series by creating an engaging and interactive curriculum-based concert experience.

In recent seasons, Cabrera has made impressive debuts with the National Symphony’s KC Jukebox at the Kennedy Center, Louisville Orchestra, Hartford Symphony, Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco, New West Symphony, Kalamazoo Symphony, and the Reno Philharmonic. In 2016, he led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in performances with Grammy Award-winning singer Lila Downs. Cabrera made his Carnegie Hall debut leading the world premiere of Mark Grey’s Ătash Sorushan with soprano, Jessica Rivera.

Awards and fellowships include a Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship at the SalzburgFestival and conducting the Nashville Symphony in the League of American Orchestra’sprestigious Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview. Donato Cabrera was recognized by the Consulate-General of Mexico in San Francisco as a Luminary of the Friends of Mexico Honorary Committee, for his contributions to promoting and developing the presence of the Mexican community in the Bay Area.

Checking in with Composer-in-Residence Katherine Balch

Now entering the second year of her three year residency with the California Symphony, we connected with Katherine Balch to see what she’s been up to since we saw her at the May concert, and to find out how the concerto she’s writing for violinist Robyn Bollinger is progressing.

Robyn Bollinger and Katherine Balch enjoying the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the lawn at Tanglewood Music Center, where Katherine was a fellow this summer.

California Symphony Orchestra: What have you been up to since the premiere of your first piece with the California Symphony in May?

Katherine Balch: After an amazing week with the California Symphony, I had a fun time celebrating with the folks at Broadcast Music Inc., at the 66th Annual BMI Student Composer Awards ceremony in NYC, where I received an award for my orchestra piece, Leaf Fabric, written for the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra (with conductor Ilan Volkov). Then, I dove right into composing a new piece for the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, called Chamber Music, which was premiered just recently in Portland, OR under Jun Markl. There’s a nice write-up about the piece and my time composing it here.

I then spent 8 weeks as a fellow at Tanglewood Music Center, in the beautiful Massachusetts Berkshires, where I worked on site-specific projects there as well as a big new piece for NYC-based trio, Bearthoven. We recently were honored to receive a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant for this project!

Watch out Donato! While a composing fellow at Tanglewood, Katherine had to write a short piece that she later had to conduct. (Balch claims she was “terrible”!)

Now, I’m back in school at Columbia University, where I’m currently in the 3rd year of my doctorate. I spent some time revisiting like a broken clock, and with the California Symphony recording in hand and some reflecting in mind, made some substantial revisions to the piece.

CSO: You’re working on your next commission for us — a violin concerto, which will premiere at the season finale and which you’re writing for your friend Robyn Bollinger. How is that going?

KB: I’m so excited to be working on this piece for my dear friend. The piece is called Artifacts, and each movement takes as a departure point a fragment or gesture from pieces in the solo violin repertoire that I love. Some of those pieces remind me of Robyn and her playing, and were chosen with her in mind, like Paganini’s 6th caprice for solo violin. I heard this piece for the first time when Robyn played all 24 of the Paganini Caprices in a single concert.

I currently have sketches of each movement, and am just starting to orchestrate some moments from each movement to workshop with the orchestra in January.

Composition sketches in Katherine’s studio at Tanglewood

CSO: You’re coming back to workshop the piece with Donato and the orchestra in January. Having done that once already last year, are approaching things any differently this time, and if so, how?

KB: I plan to use my time very differently. Last year, I came into the workshop with a basically finished draft of the piece, and the orchestra read it. This recording helped me tighten up loose ends and rework the ending of the piece, but I think because the piece was so close to done, I wasn’t as open about making changes as I could have been.

This time, I am going to bring small excerpts from each movement that each address a potential orchestral problem or question I have. In this way, it’ll be more explicitly experimental than the first workshop. I think this will be more educational for me and will also keep me open to making more drastic changes to the piece after the workshop period.

CSO: Outside of the California Symphony premiere, what else are you currently working on?

KB: Once I finish the workshop materials for California Symphony, I’ll be writing a piece for ‘cello and piano for my Young Concert Artists-roster colleague, the brilliant cellist Zlatomir Fung.

I’ll also be starting a string quartet for Juilliard’s quartet-in-residence, the Argus Quartet, which premieres the day after Robyn’s violin concerto, on May 6 in Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center.

Later in the season, I’ll be writing a double bass septet (yes, seven double basses) for Tanglewood Music Center, which will be performed in the summer.

Composition in progress: Katherine at work on the violin concerto that will have its world premiere at our 2018–19 season closer on May 5, 2019. Her cat Zarathustra likes to “help.”

Katherine Balch’s Violin Concerto will premiere May 5, 2019 at the California Symphony season finale. Tickets and information at www.californiasymphony.org/epicbruckner

Something Old, Something New— Something Different

The 2017–18 season finale features two European masterpieces (“Something Old”), a world premiere (“Something New”), and a program with a difference


At first glance, the line up for the California Symphony’s May 6 season closer —SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW—may look like business as usual. However delve deeper, and there is more to the finale than might initially meet the eye.

Balch — like a broken clock (World Premiere)

Sibelius — Symphony №3

Brahms — Piano Concerto №2, with Haochen Zhang, piano

1. A World Premiere

First on the program is the debut performance of like a broken clock, written by Young American Composer in Residence Katherine Balch (2017–2020). By definition, a world premiere is new and therefore pretty special, so we won’t labor the point. (You can read more about Balch and her fascinating approach to composing here.)

2. A Symphony That’s Short

Next up is Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’ Symphony №3.

Pro-fans will notice that this is a break with the common pattern of classical music concert programming, which usually places the symphonic work at the end, after intermission. For this program, the running order is flipped, with the symphony before the break and the piano concerto at the end.

The reason for the flip is the relative length of the pieces: For a symphony, Sibelius’ Symphony №3 is a comparatively brief piece, clocking in at 31 minutes. It even comprises one fewer movement than the usual four you might expect from a symphonic work. This is the result of Sibelius choosing to move away from the Romantic style of his previous two symphonies — long, expansive works, influenced by the likes of Tchaikovsky — to explore a more focused, compressed style, characteristic of later composers.

3. A Concerto That’s Like a Symphony

After intermission and standing in contrast to the economy of the Sibelius symphony comes the mighty Brahms’ Piano Concerto №2. Delivered 22 years after his first, which was initially savaged by critics, Brahms’ second piano concerto is a grand and sweeping piece in the tradition of Romantic composers, with moments of drama and tenderness and culminating in thrilling finale. Brahms jokingly described it to a friend as a “tiny, tiny piano concerto,” but in fact, it’s a monumental piece that is often described as a “symphony with piano.”

Most concertos have a straightforward, “fast-slow-fast” three-movement structure, but Brahms added an extra fast second movement (the scherzo), so it’s a real workout for conductor, orchestra and soloist alike. For the soloist, it is also fiendishly difficult to play.

Taking on the challenge is acclaimed piano virtuoso Haochen Zhang, who won the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at age 19. (Read more about this unique talent here.) Zhang first learned the piece at 15 and he performs it for only the second time in his career at the season finale.

“Brahms has always been one of my favorite composers, and this concerto certainly has given me an overwhelming joy everytime I listened or played it. It’s a perfect embodiment of this combination of grandness and intimacy and is perhaps why it’s so enduringly charming yet so challenging to interpret.” — Soloist Haochen Zhang on Brahms Piano Concerto №2.

4. A Special Reunion

Haochen Zhang and then Music Director candidate Donato Cabrera in 2013.

Guest artist Haochen Zhang last played with us five years ago when Donato Cabrera was a guest conductor, auditioning for the role of Music Director for the California Symphony. (Zhang played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto №4 — read more about that performance here.) The concert wowed critics, audiences, and the selection committee, and led to Cabrera’s appointment to the role he has held for the past five seasons.

Zhang says, “I recall lots of fond memories from the last time I was there. The Orchestra was really devoted and enthusiastic throughout the rehearsals, and Maestro Cabrera was not only a great conductor but such a supportive collaborator to a young musician like me.”

Cabrera chimes in: “I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to bring back Haochen since we first worked together in 2013 on Beethoven’s Piano Concerto №4. I could tell through his approach to the Beethoven that he’d bring the same wonderful singing qualities to the Brahms Piano Concerto №2.”

The California Symphony’s 2017–18 season finale concert SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW takes place Sunday, May 6 at 4PM in Walnut Creek at the Lesher Center for the Arts.

For tickets and information, visit californiasymphony.org

Composer-in-Residence Katherine Balch on Cuckoo Clocks, California, and Composing in Color

The California Symphony’s May 6 season finale includes the world premiere of Balch’s “like a broken clock”

California Symphony Young American Composer-in-Residence (2017–2020). Photo credit KatieL Photography.

We caught up with Composer-in-Residence Katherine Balch to learn more about like a broken clock, the first of three pieces she will deliver during her three-year residency with the California Symphony. Balch beat out 130 other applicants in a newly revamped, “blind” selection process to win the highly-regarded, highly competitive residency, and she is the first woman composer to take up the position in the program’s 26 year history.

The title of the piece receiving its world premiere in Walnut Creek on May 6 is inspired by a line in a song called “In California,” by singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom:

Sometimes I am so in love with you

(Like a little clock

That trembles on the edge of the hour

Only ever calling out “Cuckoo, cuckoo”)

— From “In California” by Joanna Newsom

CSO: Why is the title like a broken clock all in lower case?

KB: The title is in lower case in reference to the Joanna Newsom lyric and also because to me it signals that this piece is part of a larger whole that deals with the musical ideas I’m interested in right now, which often cross pollinate my music.

CSO: Your composition process involves a lot of drawing and sketching. As simply as possible(!), can you explain what this graphic is and how it relates to the piece?

Balch describes her sketching as “a sort of pre-compositional drawing of the formal structural and sonic palette of the piece.”

KB: Usually, my process for writing a piece begins with a lot of generating / sketching out musical ideas, and then at a certain point I try to imagine the piece as a whole in my head.

This drawing is a representation of the whole piece, and guides me as I through-compose the material. I think very visually, so representing sounds with colors and shapes helps me remember them as I begin the process of “transcribing” the sounds in my imagination to the page.

CSO: You flew out from New York for your first rehearsal reading with the California Symphony in January. Did you make any adjustments to the score as a result? What did you learn from the experience?

KB: Yes, I made a ton of changes! I was so surprised how helpful and informative a half-hour of reading could be. Listening back to the recording helped me make a million tiny adjustments to the score (dynamics, balance, doublings, simplifying) and also some larger ones (I changed the end and added about a minute of music). It also helped me add in orchestration details and filter out extraneous ones.

I am so grateful to the orchestra for helping me make this a better piece! I am a compulsive revisor, and it’s such an unusual experience to get the chance to make revisions before a premier performance like that.

“Katie’s approach to composition is full of inventiveness and whimsy. I think our audience will not only hear the implications that the title of the piece implies, but will also be surprised by how she goes about creating these sounds.” — Music Director Donato Cabrera

Balch’s piece—the “something new” in a season finale concert entitled Something Old, Something New — receives its premiere on Sunday, May 6. The “somethings old” on the program are supplied by Sibelius’ Symphony №3 and Brahms’ Piano Concerto №2, played by piano virtuoso Haochen Zhang.

For more information, please visit californiasymphony.org.

Three Composers and their Irrational Fear of Numbers

From October 13th to the 31st, the California Symphony will be exploring mysteries and superstitions surrounding symphonic composers.

Pictured left to right: Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg.

Composers can be a superstitious bunch. For this Friday the 13th during the spooky month of Halloween, we look at three who were fixated on the power of numbers. Judge for yourself if they were undone by the numbers, or if the obsessions themselves may have played a greater role in their demise….

Malicious Muse

Gustav Mahler’s wife, Alma, was known for being an artistic muse to many artists of the 20th century, but she was also ambitious and calculating. Alma claimed that Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, completed in 1904, was a forewarning of their daughter Maria’s death in 1907, and soon after Maria’s passing, Mahler began fretting about the numerology of his symphonies. Beethoven had died right after writing his Ninth, Bruckner died while writing his Ninth, and Mahler had just completed his Eighth. Mahler therefore believed that he could cheat death if his next symphony was titled rather than numbered.

Sadly, that did not work out as planned: As Alma documented in her letters, “He did not live to see the Ninth performed, or to finish the Tenth.”

As a side note, historians believe that Alma’s motivation for encouraging her husband’s morbid concerns may have been to deflect from the fact that she was cheating on him shortly before his death with Walter Gropius, a famous architect.

An Unlucky Number Indeed

Another numerophobic composer was Arnold Schoenberg. The father of 12-tone music was terrified of the number 13. He avoided rooms, floors, and buildings with the number 13. As Schoenberg aged, the anxiety over the number 13 worsened. He dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 because the year was a multiple of 13. He wrote, “Indeed, I am not so well at the moment. I am in my 65th year and you know that 5 times 13 is 65 and 13 is my bad number.”

In 1950 on his seventy-sixth birthday, fellow composer and musician Oskar Adler wrote that because 76 added up to 13 (7+6), it would be a dangerous year for Schoenberg. One day of that year, Schoenberg took to his bed, sick with worry. That day was Friday, July 13, 1951. Schoenberg didn’t make it through the night. He passed away later that day — at 11:45 p.m. — at the age of 76.

To the Memory of an Angel

Alban Berg, who was Arnold Schoenberg’s student also strongly believed in the significance of numbers. In his compositions, he would weave his lover’s and his astrological numbers. He did this in his famous Lyric Suite as well as his Violin Concerto. His Violin Concerto strikes many similarities to Mahler’s works in its focus of life and death and use of folk songs, however there is a more notable connection between Mahler and Berg’s Violin Concerto. The piece was composed in honor of Manon Gropius, who was the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius. Manon Gropius died suddenly and tragically at the age of 18 from polio. Even in his grief, Berg astonishingly accomplished the work in less than four months. When asked by his wife to slow down, he replied, “I cannot — I don’t have time.”

Was this urgency caused by the desire to memorialize an unfortunate young girl’s life, or a premonition of his own imminent death? Alban Berg died from sepsis caused by an insect bite at the age of 50 on Christmas Eve — just four months after finishing his Violin Concerto.

Did the numbers really have it in for these three composers — they couldn’t escape their fates? Or was it all just simple chance and coincidence, perhaps exacerbated by the phobias themselves?

We’d put good money on the latter. But then again, maybe we’ll wait until after this Friday the 13th to place that bet…

COMING UP:

A Lemony Snicket Holiday — Saturday, December 23, 2017 at 4PM and 8PM

Pastoral Beethoven — Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 8PM & Sunday, January 21 at 4PM

Mozart Requiem — Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 8PM & Sunday, March 18 at 4PM

Something Old, Something New — Sunday, May 6, 2018 at 4PM

Tickets are available at 925.943.SHOW and LesherCenter.com. Prices start at just $33 per concert.

ABOUT CALIFORNIA SYMPHONY

The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.

Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.

We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.

California Symphony has launched the careers of some of today’s most-performed soloists and composers, including violinists Sarah Chang and Anne Akiko Meyers, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and composers such as Mason Bates, Christopher Theofanidis, and Kevin Puts. The Orchestra performs at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

For more information, please visit californiasymphony.org.

About our Season Opener Pre-Concert Talk Speakers


We have a blockbuster line up for our pre-concert talk on Sunday. Joining Music Director Donato Cabrera onstage in the Hofmann Theater at the Lesher Center for the Arts at 3PM, one hour before the performance, will be OOVE inventor Oliver DiCicco, composer Nathaniel Stookey, and soprano Maria Valdes. The talk is free to ticket holders of our LYRICAL DREAMS season opener and will also be streamed live via Facebook LIVE. Just go to our Facebook page and click the “Follow” button to receive an alert and watch from wherever you are.

Oliver DiCicco

Oliver DiCicco — creator of the OOVE, a brand new musical instrument that’s featured in Nathaniel Stookey’s YTTE (Yield To Total Elation) — is a multi-talented designer, sculptor, fabricator, scientist, engineer, and musician. He has made San Francisco his base of operations for over thirty years.

Early in his career he was the owner and chief engineer of Mobius Music Recording, a highly respected, state of the art recording facility. His work in the audio field has been recognized by several Grammy nominations, and RIAA gold record awards. His sculptural work focuses primarily on musical instrument sculpture and kinetic sound sculpture.

Check out his other musical instrument designs, including the whimsically named Olivetti, Anenome, and Crawdad at his website.

Nathaniel Stookey

First commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony at age 17, Nathaniel Stookey has collaborated with many of the world’s great orchestras including The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, The National Symphony, The Toronto Symphony, The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and The Hallé Orchestra, where he was composer-in-residence under Kent Nagano.

Stookey’s YTTE (Yield To Total Elation), which originally debuted in April 2016 as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s Sound Box series, makes its West Coast full orchestra version premiere in our season opener concert. The piece was inspired by 1930s architect A.G. Rizzoli’s intricate architectural renderings of friends, imagined as grand and fantastical buildings and stars the OOVE, DiCicco’s new musical instrument, which Stookey will play in performance during our season opener.

Stookey’s The Composer Is Dead, a “whodunit” guide to the orchestra with words by Lemony Snicket, will be featured in our holiday program, A LEMONY SNICKET HOLIDAY. It has been performed by hundreds of orchestras worldwide and is one of the five most performed works of the 21st century.

Maria Valdes

Soprano Maria Valdes makes her debut with the California Symphony on Sunday, however it’s not the first time that Ms Valdes has worked with Music Director Donato Cabrera. She performed Mahler’s Symphony №4 last September with the Las Vegas Philharmonic under Cabrera’s direction.

A former Adler Fellow and alumna of the San Francisco Opera Merola Program, Ms Valdes also debuts with Opera San José in their 2017–18 season, first as Despina in Cosi fan tutte and later Lisette in La rondine. She is featured soloist for the Mahler and on Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which she performed with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra last November.

Donato Cabrera

Donato Cabrera is the Music Director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and served as the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and the Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009–2016.

Since Cabrera’s appointment as Music Director of the California Symphony, the organization has been reinvigorated. With its expanded concert series, dramatically increased ticket sales, and innovative programming, the California Symphony and Cabrera are redefining what it means to be and orchestra in the 21st Century.

Our season opener LYRICAL DREAMS takes place Sunday, September 24 at 4pm, at Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek.

· Donato Cabrera, conductor

· Maria Valdes, soprano

PROGRAM:

Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24

Stookey YTTE (Yield To Total Elation)

Mahler Symphony №4

Tickets are available at 925.943.SHOW and LesherCenter.com. Prices start at just $33 per concert.

PRE-CONCERT TALK:

Music Director Donato Cabrera gives a pre-concert talk, free to ticket holders, offering insights about the music, beginning one hour before the performance at 3PM.

Cabrera will be joined on stage by soprano Maria Valdes, Bay Area Composer Nathaniel Stookey, and Grammy-award nominated sound engineer and inventor Oliver DiCicco. The talk will also be live-streamed from our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/californiasymphony/

TICKETS:

Tickets are $42 to $72 and $20 for students and are available by calling 925.943.SHOW and online at californiasymphony.org.

Season ticket packages are also on sale for as little as $99 — just $33 per concert — including the new Saturday night series.

COMING UP:

A Lemony Snicket Holiday — Saturday, December 23, 2017 at 4PM and 8PM

Pastoral Beethoven — Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 8PM & Sunday, January 21 at 4PM

Mozart Requiem — Saturday, March 17, 2018 at 8PM & Sunday, March 18 at 4PM

Something Old, Something New — Sunday, May 6, 2018 at 4PM

ABOUT CALIFORNIA SYMPHONY

The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.

Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.

We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.

California Symphony has launched the careers of some of today’s most-performed soloists and composers, including violinists Sarah Chang and Anne Akiko Meyers, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and composers such as Mason Bates, Christopher Theofanidis, and Kevin Puts. The Orchestra performs at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

For more information, please visit californiasymphony.org.

Maestro on Mahler


Music Director Donato Cabrera reflects on Mahler, whose Symphony №4 is featured in our season opener, LYRICAL DREAMS, on Sunday, September 24.

When listening to a composition by Gustav Mahler, try to think about time and place. As in, the precise time and place Mahler aimed to convey in the music.

Mahler was trying to create an entire environment, whether it’s going back to his childhood in Bohemia or dealing with the knowledge of his own mortality. His music is an entire universe. It’s a philosophy, it’s geography, it’s smelling the blossoms in the air. Through his music, he’s really trying to touch all the senses.

The Austrian composer, born 1860, applied unique methods to his music. These included infusing his compositions with the melodies of street musicians and sounds depicting everyday noises, all with the aim of creating a snapshot of life. It had really never been explored to this degree by other composers, and it’s for this very reason that his music wasn’t popular in Vienna during his lifetime.

Mahler’s Symphony №4 is a prime example of the composer’s style. The symphony, written as an exploration of the world through a child’s eyes, includes sounds borrowed from Mahler’s own rural childhood, such as sleigh bells that were commonly strung on horses. The symphony’s second movement goes a step further, with a solo violin recreating a common fairy tale of the time, in which a sinister pied piper lures children out of a village.

It’s a direct reference to what was a very real concern for children, noting the many dangers for children in an era when outdoor lighting at night was uncommon. This was the typical message: Don’t talk to strangers. Bad things will happen if you follow a stranger out of the village.

Another strong theme can be observed in many of Mahler’s compositions: death. This includes his “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), comprised of songs based on poems about the grieving process. Some even link elements of his symphonies to deaths and illness experienced in his own family. This merely reflects the era Mahler lived in when the average lifespan was short and most families expected to lose multiple children to illness. It’s sort of like the Blues. It’s only through accepting hardship and looking it straight in the face that one finds solace and beauty in it.

Mahler’s music has had tremendous influence with composers throughout the 20th century emulating his musical style and focus. Mahler’s style can still be seen in European music composed today. The prevalence of his music stems back to the relatability of his compositions, which held greater appeal to audiences as society opened up to understanding human emotion and experience at the turn of the century.

Why it’s become so popular and why it captures the hearts of so many people is really that it’s a great reflection of the 20th century and who we are as modern individuals. That’s why his music became so ubiquitous.

Originally published on the Smith Center’s Blog http://www.thesmithcenter.com/blog/listening-to-mahler-more-than-just-music/

LYRICAL DREAMS is at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on Sunday September 24 at 4pm and includes:

Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Stookey YTTE (Yield To Total Elation)

Mahler Symphony №4

Tickets are available at 925.943.SHOW and LesherCenter.com. Prices start at just $33 per concert.

ABOUT CALIFORNIA SYMPHONY

The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.

Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.

We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.

California Symphony has launched the careers of some of today’s most-performed soloists and composers, including violinists Sarah Chang and Anne Akiko Meyers, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and composers such as Mason Bates, Christopher Theofanidis, and Kevin Puts. The Orchestra performs at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

For more information, please visit californiasymphony.org.

Happy Birthday to Local Aspiring Composer Margaret Martin!

Margaret Martin with her brother Gregory, after opening night of the Lamplighters’ “Yeomen of the Guard” in the Lesher Center this summer.

We were delighted to learn that the winner of our Symphony Surround auction package to meet incoming composer-in-residence Katherine Balch, is an aspiring composer in her own right!

Margaret’s mom spotted the auction package — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shadow Katherine as she prepares to deliver like a broken clock, her first commission for the California Symphony — and instantly knew it would be a wonderful 16th birthday gift for her daughter.

Music has always been a passion for Margaret, who is entering her junior year at SF University High School this year. She has sung with the San Francisco Girls Chorus for 10 years, and she is a member of the Lamplighters Music Theater company. Her interest in composing was piqued by a music class she took at school last year. After learning about fugues, she thought to herself, “Why not write one?” And so she did. Composing has been a focus for the Berkeley native since then.

Here’s her composition breathe, which premiered at the San Francisco Conservatory on July 14 this year. The piece is part of a planned series that explores the theme of mental health, including depression and anxiety. Margaret explains that the lower case title relates to the “small voice” her mother says she gets when she gets stressed out.

(Also of note, the video features California Symphony principal oboist, Laura Reynolds, who coordinates the SFCM’s summer camp which Margaret attended.)

So from all of us at the California Symphony, Happy 16th Birthday, Margaret! So much achieved already, and so much more to come, we’re sure!

We can’t wait to see you again when you get to meet Katherine Balch in January. We are certain you’ll have a lot to talk about.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o8uh3S_NfmS0Z3RGFIY0huQms/view?ts=596d8786

ABOUT CALIFORNIA SYMPHONY

The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.

Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.

We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.

California Symphony has launched the careers of some of today’s most-performed soloists and composers, including violinists Sarah Chang and Anne Akiko Meyers, cellist Alisa Weilerstein, and composers such as Mason Bates, Christopher Theofanidis, and Kevin Puts. The Orchestra performs at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

For more information, please visit californiasymphony.org.