SF Symphony to perform Shostakovich gem
The Santa Fe Symphony will perform what conductor Guillermo Figueroa considers the finest piece ever written by a young composer next Sunday. And no, it’s not Mozart. The musicians will play Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1, op. 10 at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe.
“It’s amazing,” Figueroa said. “This symphony was literally his graduation thesis for the Moscow Conservatory when he was 19. To reach that level of sophistication and language at 19 is just remarkable.”
Written in 1924 by an unknown Russian music student, the work was led by Bruno Walter in Berlin the next year; Leopold Stokowski conducted the American premiere in 1928. The “First” was a mature work of art by a composer with a distinctive voice. Cheeky one second, lyrical the next, it moves with a sizzling energy and an instinctive grasp of symphonic form.
The program will open with guest violinist Alexi Kenney playing Dvorák’s Romance for Violin and Orchestra.
“I hear he is absolutely phenomenal,” Figueroa said of the soloist. “I’m thrilled about the repertoire he’s doing, because both pieces are fairly unusual.
The recipient of a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Kenney was named “a talent to watch”
by The New York Times.
Kenney also will play Haydn’s heroic Violin Concerto in C Major.
“The Haydn concerto is a precursor of Mozart,” Figueroa said. “It’s coupled with an absolutely gorgeous piece by Dvorák.”
The evening also includes a Figueroa favorite — Berlioz. The orchestra will play the composer’s Overture: Le corsaire, op. 21. It took Berlioz more than 20 years to write it.
The composer won the Prix de Rome in 1831, the ultimate award for young French composers, entailing a year’s study in Italy. But he had fallen in love with a 19-yearold pianist he did not want to leave. He went anyway, and his fiancée dumped him. At first, he wanted to shoot both his lover and the other man. Instead, he holed up in Nice, wandering through the orange groves and along the beach. He sketched out plans for a new piece.
He didn’t return to them until 1844. The composition arrived with a new name, “Le corsaire rouge,” the French translation of the title of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Red Rover,” a novel about a mysterious pirate.
“The Berlioz is one of the greatest of all time,” Figueroa said. “I’m a Berlioz fanatic. It’s a virtuosic symphony for the orchestra.”