La Jolla Symphony & Chorus

Saturday Concerts at 8 PM
Sunday Concerts at 3 PM
Mandeville Auditorium, UCSD

The La Jolla Symphony opens its 54th season with a concert that takes us around the world and through different conceptions of time. Smetana’s tone poem pictures a day and a night on the mighty river that flows through Prague. Brahms composed his Second Symphony during a summer spent on the sunny shore of an Austrian lake. Takemitsu's percussion concerto draws us into an entirely different sensation of time.Program Notes

Evan Ziporyn’s Balinese-inspired Frog's Eye features the dynamic Tijuana dance troupe Lux Boreal as "shadow puppet" dancers with choreography by UCSD's Allyson Green. Margaret Zhou, our 2008 Young Artists Competition winner, performs one of the great cello concertos of the twentieth century. We conclude with Stravinsky's endearing ballet about a forlorn puppet that comes to life during the Shrovetide Fair–with mysterious results.

We celebrate the 200th birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, born on the same day in 1809. Copland’s Lincoln Portrait and Anthony Davis' Amistad Symphony (drawn from his opera about slavery) remind us of one of Lincoln's greatest challenges. Nee Commission winner Rick Snow offers a musical evocation of Darwin's achievement. The concert concludes with a completely different journey into the past, Respighi's brilliant Pines of Rome.

Choral Director David Chase leads an imaginative program that divides the chorus in two and offers two very different pieces. On the first half, the women of the chorus join the orchestra for Debussy’s lovely setting of Gabriel-Dante Rosetti's poem about medieval love, The Blessed Damozel. On the second half, the men of the chorus join the orchestra for one of Stravinsky's masterpieces, his oratorio based on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.

Beethoven's moving Elegy for chorus and string orchestra begins a program that features stunning guest artist Maya Beiser performing Elgar's heartbreaking Cello Concerto. In The General, author/librettist Paul Griffiths draws a composite score from Beethoven (Egmont, King Stephen, Leonore Prohaska and Opferlied) and adds text to create a dramatic work for orchestra, chorus, and actor that tells the story of the Rwandan tragedy through the eyes of the general leading the U.N. peacekeeping mission.

Our season concludes as soloists, chorus, and orchestra join together for a performance of Mahler’s mighty "Resurrection" Symphony.  Modeled loosely on Beethoven's Ninth, it moves from a stormy beginning to a triumphant conclusion, full of ringing bells and exultant peals of sound.  In its optimistic energy, it makes a perfect conclusion to an exciting season.