The symphony’s season of four concerts will provide a banquet of visual, literary and the musical arts
Published in the Sept. 30 – Oct. 13, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Morgan Hill Life file photo
Christopher Niemann conducts a rehearsal in this file photo from last year. The 2015-16 season kicks off Oct. 10.
With its fall concert focusing on the theme of “Portraits, Paintings and Poems,” the South Valley Symphony kicks off its 2015-2016 concert season Oct. 10 at Gavilan Community College’s theater.
The symphony musicians are excited about the upcoming concert for its daring in trying new and challenging musical pieces, said conductor and music director Anthony Quartuccio.
“It’s going to be a thrilling season,” he said. “We’ve started our third week of rehearsals and there’s a lot of energy and enthusiasm and it’s going to be a terrific season. It’s going to be something new. We’re always looking for ways to share our wonderful gift of music that incorporates other arts and that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
The season of four concerts will provide a banquet of visual, literary and the musical arts reflected in poetry, paintings and even movies, he said.
“For October’s concert, generally we’ve in the past started with a very serious concert that sets the tone for the year. And we wanted to depart from that,” he said. “It’s going to be more of a feast of a multi-media experience.”
Symphonic music composer Christopher Niemann conducts a recent rehearsal. This season’s South Valley Symphony concerts are designed to share fun music with the audience while challenging the musicians with exciting material.
Morgan Hill Life file photo
Among the highlights of the concert is a piece specially written and conducted for the concert by Morgan Hill resident Christopher Niemann, a 2013 graduate of Sobrato High School. His world premiere of “In the Halls of the Overlook” contains an incredible foreboding that is based on a best-selling horror novel.
“I asked Christopher to come up with something that reflects music and poetry or music and literature — something that combines the two together,” Quartuccio said. “We went through several interesting ideas. The one he came up with is this wonderful musical pictorial — it’s a short piece but very descriptive piece based on the novel ‘The Shining’ by Stephen King.”
The composition is more daring than others that Niemann has written for the symphony in the past, and it shows a growing maturity of the young composer, Quartuccio said.
“It fits perfectly so that when people are listening to this and experiencing this piece for the first time, they can visualize the movie, but more importantly the book by Stephen King,” he said. “You can actually feel the drama behind the music.”
Another piece that will be performed at the fall concert is the “Poet & Peasant Overture” by Franz von Suppé, an Austrian composer of light operas from the 19th century.
“It’s sort of in the same genre as the ‘William Tell Overture,’” Quartuccio said. “It’s something that when you play it, everyone knows it. It’s a really festive light-hearted tuneful way to start the program.”
“The Moldau” by Bedřich Smetana is another piece selected for the Oct. 10 which is sure to arouse the audience’s passions.
The piece is a tonal poem, or a musical description of things in nature along the Moldau, the river that goes through Prague where Smetana lived, Quartuccio said.
“It’s a musical description of the ebb and flow of water through the river. There are little streams and rapids and there’s a wedding scene where a couple are getting married right next to the river,” he said. “It’s an enormously colorful description of this river in the Czech Republic. The music sounds like the water, that’s so really cool about it.”
The fall concert will also showcase the piece “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky. This musical composition is all about the experience of a person going into a museum and promenading through the various galleries and gazing at the various painting in a museum. The music depicts various real paintings done by a friend of Mussorgsky’s that inspired the composer. The symphony will provide photos of the paintings for the audience to see the similarity between the visual and the musical.
Among them are paintings of the Great Gate of Kiev, chickens trying to get out of shell, and a French market place outside Paris, Quartuccio said.
“The music absolutely captures what you’re seeing. It’s quite amazing,” he said.
Quartuccio feels excited about the three other concerts in the South Valley Symphony season. The winter concert Sunday Dec. 13 is called “Holiday Panorama” and will feature operatic soprano Milena Georgieva performing a solo of Mozart’s “Exsultate Jubilate.”
“It is an enormously beautiful piece,” Quartuccio said. “We’ve never done that before.”
The winter concert will also bring in Greg Chambers, the director of music at Sobrato High School and an accomplished saxophonist, he said.
“He’s playing a piece by John Williams (written for the movie ‘Catch Me If You Can’) that features a saxophone solo playing with the orchestra,” he said. “It’s going to be a fantastic experience — a kind of jazzy sort of piece. New traditions and old — we’re keeping that going during the holidays.”
Other pieces at the concert include the suite from “Sleeping Beauty” by Tchaikovsky and “Christmas Festival” by Leroy Anderson.
The March 5 concert will have the theme of “Rising Young Artists” and will feature the Bacchanale from Saint-Saens’ “Samson & Delilah” and Berceuse and the finale from “The Firebird” by Stravinsky. The winner of the Al Navarro Youth Competition will also perform at this concert.
2015 Live Oak High School graduate Robert Alexander is now composing a piece titled “Morgan Hill Life” specially written for this concert and commissioned by the Morgan Hill Life newspaper.
“He’s been working on it for a while and I don’t know how it’s going to go but I’m excited to hear how it turns out,” Quartuccio said.
On May 8, the popular Mission Concert at San Juan Batista, held on Mother’s Day, will feature the theme of “Postcards from the Americas” as its tribute to the music of the New World.
“We’ve had so many blockbuster kinds of themes for the Mission Concert that we were in search of another one,” Quartuccio said. “The original idea was to do a culmination of American and Mexican music, which we have done. And then I thought: why not expand it to all of North America and South America — and the whole Americas. And I thought why don’t we make it a musical travelogue through the Americas.”
The concert will start with a flute solo, accompanied by orchestra, of an original Native American music, performed by orchestra musician Jeff Chambers. It will end with an American jazz piece performed by the Zinfandel Stompers accompanied by the orchestra.
This season’s South Valley Symphony concerts are designed to share fun music with the audience while challenging the musicians with exciting new material, Quartuccio said.
“We want to try to have a little something for everybody,” he said. “But we also want to have stuff that really hasn’t been done before that will peek the curiosity of our audiences. They’ll wonder what we’ll be offering. This is an opportunity to hear a little gem. There’s this wonderful, warm family of musicians who want to play for them, so why not go.”
The South Valley Symphony opens its concerts free to children under 18 and students with identification. General admission to the Gavilan College concerts is $25 a ticket and to the Mission Concert it’s $40 which includes a reception in the Mission Garden immediately after the concert.
