The next brace of concerts by the Santa Barbara Symphony — at 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday in The Granada — will be even more memorable than usual for this noble musical institution. For one of the works in these concerts, the orchestra will move to the pit to make room on stage for the State Street Ballet, which will dance a new version of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, choreographed by the State Street’s William Soleau.

Although the symphony has collaborated many times with choral groups, this will be its first-ever collaboration with a ballet company. Symphony concerts are always something to hear, and this one will be something to see as well.

The other works on the program are Igor Stravinsky’s neo-classical tune-fest Pulcinella (1919) and Franz Schubert’s completely wonderful Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat, D. 485. Maestro Nir Kabaretti will conduct.

Contrary to popular notions, Appalachian Spring (1944) was neither Copland’s first ballet nor his first use of American folk music. During the 1920s and early 1930s, his music was very avant garde, austere and dissonant. In 1934, he visited Mexico and made friends with Carlos Chavez. During this first visit, he began to compose El Salón México, a tone poem that makes brilliant use of folk music — Mexican, in this case — and marks the true turning point in his style.

He discovered in himself a gift for orchestrating folk tunes, and a couple of years later applied it to American folk songs in Billy the Kid, the first in a trilogy of Americana ballets that made indelible his mark on American music. Four years after that, he produced Rodeo, and then, two years further along, Appalachian Spring. Having decided, as the Great Depression deepened, to write music that would appeal to all Americans — not just a small group of cognoscenti — “simplicity” became his watchword.

How his heart must have leaped when he found the Shaker song “Simple Gifts,” whose melody became his signature tune:

‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free
‘Tis a gift to come down where we want to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
It will be in the Valley of Love and Delight

Copland wrote only five ballets, and only three of them are still played and performed. Stravinsky, on the other hand, wrote 12 ballets, so-designated, and saw perhaps a dozen more of his other works choreographed as ballets.

Pulcinella was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, who had the manuscript scores for a number of Trio Sonatas attributed to Giovanni Pergolesi (though few musicologists now do so), and wanted a ballet in the style of 18th century commedia dell’arte. He didn’t count on the composer providing a stripped-down score suitable for an 18th century theater orchestra, but that is what he got.

Like Copland, Stravinsky was a master orchestrator, and once he had internalized the pseudo-Pergolesi melodies, he transformed them utterly, into modern music. For his other great ballet derived from another composer’s music, The Fairy’s Kiss, from Pyotr Tchaikovksy piano pieces, he achieved an even more astonishing metamorphosis. “Listening to a concert of the saccharine source material for (The Fairy’s Kiss) the other day,” Stravinsky told Robert Craft, “I almost succumbed to diabetes.” Pulcinella is a sort of tipsy delight.

Always excepting the dreamy Unfinished Symphony, the Fifth Symphony may well be Schubert’s greatest work in the form. It is certainly the most charming. As with all of Schubert’s work, both the charm and the greatness defy analysis. He was even better than Felix Mendelssohn at taking the hint from Wolfgang Mozart, and this is the most Mozartean symphony ever produced after Mozart’s death.

Tickets to this weekend’s performances are available from The Granada box office at 1214 State St. or 805.899.2222. Click here to order online.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com.