Arts » University Symphony Plays the Romantic Card

University Symphony Plays the Romantic Card

The program will feature a second performance of Justin Aftab's Hypothesis, and excerpts from works by Wagner and Stravinsky

By Gerald Carpenter, Noozhawk Contributor | Published on 06.02.2009

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The accent will definitely be on the romantic at 8 p.m. Wednesday in UCSB’s Lotte Lehman Concert Hall, when Richard Rintoul leads the University Symphony in its final concert of the 2008-09 academic year.

If you missed Justin Aftab’s Hypothesis the first time it was performed, now is your chance to hear it.

The program, which features a second performance of Justin Aftab’s Hypothesis, delivers the romance with excerpts from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Götterdämmerung and Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird. Also, UCSB Concerto Competition winners violist Alex Chang and pianist Stella Hsin Hsin Hsu will perform the solo parts in, respectively, the first movement of William Walton’s Viola Concerto (1929) and Sergei Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934).

Aftab’s Hypothesis is the only work I hesitate to call “romantic,” inasmuch as I missed the first performance of it, and have never heard anything else by him. I can only pass on the note about this young composer from the program of last year’s Primavera Festival: “Justin Aftab is from Santa Clarita, California, and began learning music in the form of piano lessons at the age of 6. Over the years, he became increasingly interested in composition, and used the piano as the sole medium for all of his early pieces. He is currently a second-year undergraduate at UCSB, studying composition with Jeremy Haladyna and piano with Charles Asche. He intends to continue his studies into graduate school, and hopes to one day write and perform his own concert music as a profession.”

For all the railing I have done about Wagner in the past, I have never denied that he is a great composer. Indeed, him being a great composer is one of the things I hold against him. No matter how vile a human being he may have been, I can’t help but be transfixed by his music. He’s adept at seizing control of the listener’s emotional equipment.

Die Gotterdammerung, the last opera of The Ring of the Nibelungs tetralogy, features the death of the heroic meathead Siegfried and the destruction of the world. Stravinsky wrote The Firebird when he was fresh from studying with Rimsky-Korsakov. It is probably his most romantic score. Walton’s Viola Concerto is a hauntingly beautiful piece, full of his unique yet pleasing melodies.

As for the Rachmaninov, Wikipedia lists 38 composers who have either transcribed Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 for Solo Violin — among the better-known are Boris Blacher, Johannes Brahms, Luigi Dallapiccola, Eliot Fisk, Benny Goodman, Lowell Liebermann, Franz Liszt, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Witold Lutosławski, Nathan Milstein, Joe Stump and Karol Szymanowski. Yet Rachmaninov’s piece is, with good reason, the only one anybody thinks about.

Tickets to Wednesday’s concert are available at the door and are $15 for general admission and $7 and students. For more information about music at UCSB, click here or call 805.893.7001.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.

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