Name: Songs for Lovers: The Music of Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker, and Dinah Washington
Start: 2026-02-14T19:30:00
Location: Jacobs Music Center

Charles McPherson

Gilbert Castellanos

Willie Jones III

Melissa Morgan

San Diego Symphony

Three works inspired in very different ways by folk music and the mix of different cultures. Perú Negro (Black Peru), by San Diego Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence Jimmy López, was composed in 2012, and in the words of the composer “showcases my native country’s Afro-Peruvian heritage” while celebrating the exuberant fusion of African and Latin elements in the popular music of his native land. Alban Berg’s last completed work, his mystical Violin Concerto, was written in 1935 “to the memory of an angel”. The angel was Manon, the daughter of Alma Mahler (by her second husband) who had died a few months earlier at the age of 18. Berg includes in his concerto a beautiful folk-tune from the Southern Austrian Catholic region of Carinthia, and a haunting old German Protestant hymn-tune, which Bach had used several times. Mendelssohn’s "Scottish" Symphony, like his Hebrides Overture, was inspired by his youthful trip to Scotland where the young Berliner was overwhelmed by the feeling of a haunting and ancient culture. In his symphony we hear echoes of Scottish traditional music for bagpipes, fiddles and harps, the skipping rhythms of Scottish folk dancing, and Romantic impressions of ruined medieval castles and monasteries.

Folk Auras: Thayer Plays Berg Violin Concerto

Jacobs Music Center

Our season ends with two of the most spectacular and orchestrally overwhelming scores from the late romantic period: Richard Strauss’s epic tone-poem Also sprach Zarathustra, inspired by Nietzsche’s account of the deep meditations of the half- mythical Persian hermit-philosopher Zoroaster; and Bartók’s dramatic fantasy Bluebeard’s Castle, based on the ancient fairy-tale about a young woman who marries a mysterious aristocrat and discovers that he has terrible secrets kept behind locked doors.

Also sprach Zarathustra & Bluebeard's Castle

Spend Valentine's Day with loved ones and the music of Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker and Dinah Washington.