Community Corner
Redwood Symphony to showcase the Fantastic Four
A diverse
concert of dazzling energy and rarely encountered works is promised in Redwood
Symphony’s Fantastic Four at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 19, in the Main Theater at Cañada College, 4200 Farm Hill Blvd. at I-280, Redwood City.
The four composers include John Adams, Claude Debussy, Lee Actor and Louis Gottschalk.
Directed by
Maestro Eric Kujawsky, the program will open with Adams’s Short Ride on a Fast
Machine, a virtuoso showpiece of dazzling rhythmic complexity, held
together only by the repeated, stubborn insistence of a lone woodblock — and
dramatized by a Matthew Bain light show.
Next,
Debussy’s Jeux
is a ballet score written for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. The ballet’s
story about a “love match” played out during a tennis game is complete with
supertitles. Though its musical language represented a radical new direction
for the composer, the premiere was vastly overshadowed soon after by the
scandalous premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
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South Bay
composer Lee Actor has another hit on his hands with his concerto for the
usually neglected alto saxophone, with soloist Joe Schillaci.
Finally comes a rarely played treat: the most important orchestral score by Gottschalk, a major
early American composer who was born in New Orleans of a Jewish businessman and
a Creole mother. He became a renowned piano soloist, often playing his own
virtuoso compositions, which were greatly influenced by the black and South
American musical “flavors” of the region. Festa Criole from A Night in
the Tropics is a perfect encore for any concert, one that will make you wish
you could get up and dance!
Kujawsky’s pre-concert talk will begin at 7 p.m.
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Tickets from $10-$30 and further information are
available at RedwoodSymphony.org. Children under 18 are admitted free, and
parking is free as well.
Redwood Symphony is an all-volunteer orchestra dedicated to
the performance of ambitious, contemporary repertoire as well as the great orchestral classics. Its
August 2012 performance of the Berlioz Requiem at Davies Symphony Hall in San
Francisco was critically acclaimed.
