Name: Beethoven Concerto No. 3 and Symphony No. 4
Start: 2023-02-25T20:00:00
Location: San Diego Civic Theatre

Benjamin Grosvenor

Case Scaglione

San Diego Symphony

The legendary Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz writes music of terrific and visceral energy and notable melodic sweetness, and the San Diego Symphony Orchestra is thrilled to be taking part in these performances of her new cello concerto Dzonot, specially written for our very own Alisa Weilerstein. Ortiz is well-known not only for the deep connection to Latin American folk-music in her compositions, but also for her passionate concern for the vulnerable and fragile environment of our planet. In this concerto, she was inspired by the "cenotes", the vast and world-famous limestone sinkholes in Mexico, which are like underground worlds all their own, with their own rivers, lakes, and plant and animal life.

From the Depths to the Heights: Ein Heldenleben

Jacobs Music Center

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

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.