Many of our local music providers are wrapping up their seasons this month, including the flagship, the Santa Barbara Symphony, which will present its final program of 2011-2012 at 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday in The Theatre.
Nir Kabaretti, who has just re-upped for another three-year tour as the symphony’s music director, will conduct, and will make use of the symphony’s French hornist, Teag Reaves, as soloist.
The concert will open with the first Santa Barbara performance of the overture Sidereus by red-hot Argentine-born composer Osvaldo Golijov, followed by the Concerto No. 2 in Eb-Major for French Horn and Orchestra, K. 417 by Wolfgang Mozart. After the intermission, we will hear the Symphony No. 8 in G-Major, Opus 88 by Antonín Dvořák.
Golijov’s Sidereus, inspired by Galileo’s celestial observations and discoveries, was specially commissioned by a consortium of 35 orchestras, including the Santa Barbara Symphony. In composing Sidereus, it was suggested by some that Golijov “borrowed” rather too heavily from a work called Barbeich, by composer Michael Ward-Bergeman, who happens to be a close friend. Golijov waited three weeks before setting things straight.
He said that both Sidereus and Barbeich, as well as a recent string quartet of Golijov’s, were partly derived from several discarded passages of a film score that he and Ward-Bergeman collaborated on: Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro from 2009.
“There was this beautiful material,” Golijov said. “It didn’t work for the movie, but it worked for music. We decided both: ‘Let’s grab it. Each one can do what he wants.’” And so it went.
Dvořák wrote the Eighth Symphony in 1889 and conducted the first performance himself, in Prague, in 1890. It is a cheery, rollicking work, full of the spirit of Bohemian folk music.
Tickets to these concerts are available from The Granada box office at 1214 State St. or 805.899.2222, or click here to order online. Students with valid student ID can purchase $10 tickets in advance at The Granada box office.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews.
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