Fall Concert - Young People's Symphony Orchestra

Young People’s Symphony Orchestra (YPSO:
http://www.ypsomusic.net/) kicks off its 77th season with the Fall Concert that will feature
guest pianist Norman Krieger, music
director/conductor David Ramadanoff, and 100 young musicians in a
program of Aaron Copland’s El Salón México, Jennifer
Higdon’s Blue Cathedral, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3
in D minor at the El Cerrito High School Performing Arts Theater.

The opening concert of YPSO’s 77th
season is a concert of many firsts, including its first performances at the El
Cerrito High School Performing Arts Theater, but most of them center around the
monumental Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3: 
guest pianist Norman Krieger will perform the Rachmaninoff for the first

time, it will be David Ramadanoff’s first time to conduct the piece, and it

will be the first time the orchestra has ever played the 45-minute work, which

will be the featured piece on the program.

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano

Concerto, which received its premiere in 1909 in New York with the composer at

the piano, is a gigantic work that only virtuoso pianists can attempt, much

less play well. Rachmaninoff dedicated the piece to his friend and legendary

pianist Josef Hoffman, who never played the work, but, instead, it was the

young Vladimir Horowitz who championed the work in the 1920s and 1930s and made
it part of the regular concert repertoire. 

Krieger, who is a professor of piano

at the University of Southern California, has played to critical acclaim many

of the standard piano concerti in the classical music repertoire with American

and European orchestras, but has never performed the Rachmaninoff Third Piano
Concerto. “It’s been a dream of mine my whole life to play it,” he says.

Krieger likens the work to an opera, given its vast scope. “It reflects the

human condition on an epic scale. The first movement is like the history of the

piano. Rachmaninoff was experimenting with so many things. You hear choral

music, Bach and Liszt in it. And using the modern piano’s capabilities, he took

advantage of all the overtones, layers of sound, and celebrates sonority. I

can’t think of any other concerto that does that before it,” he says

For Ramadanoff, Rachmaninoff’s Third

Piano Concerto is a challenge since he’s never conducted it before. “There’s so

much to sort out, so much interaction between the pianist and orchestra. The

integration of the orchestra and piano is complex,” says Ramadanoff. Krieger

and Ramadanoff have collaborated before at the Vallejo Symphony on Liszt and

Brahms piano concerti, and first met when they were both students at The

Juilliard School in New York in the 1970s. “Norman is a marvelous pianist,”

says Ramadanoff.

Krieger is one of the most acclaimed

pianists of his generation, highly regarded as an artist of depth, sensitivity

and virtuosic flair. Krieger has appeared with the major orchestras of North

America, among them the New York, Los Angeles, Buffalo Philharmonics, the

Minnesota Orchestra, the Boston Pops Orchestra and the Baltimore, Chicago,

Milwaukee, Oregon, and Saint Louis Symphony Orchestras. In recital, he has been
heard throughout the United States, Europe, Mexico and Asia, while chamber
music collaborations have included appearances with the Tokyo and Manhattan
String Quartets. He has recorded seven CDs that include the music of Bach,
Beethoven, Berg, Bernstein, Brahms, Chopin, Haydn, Gerswhin, Martinu, and
Mozart. For more information on Krieger, go to www.normankrieger.com.

The orchestra will open the concert

with a performance of Aaron Copland’s El Salón México.  Copland composed this vibrant and harmonically
inventive piece after the he visited an enormous dance hall called Salón
México during a trip to Mexico City in 1932. He based it on melodies of
Mexican folk songs he found later, but reinvented them with his emerging compositional
style that made his music seem both familiar yet new, all the while trying to
capture the spirit of the Mexican people he discovered in the dance hall. Ramadanoff
calls El Salón a wonderful

study in learning complex rhythms for the orchestra’s musicians. “It’s good

rhythmic discipline and fun to play,” he says.

The other work on the program will be

Pulitzer-Prize winning American composer Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral. Her

most performed orchestral work, Higdon composed it for the Curtis

Institute of Music’s 75th anniversary in 2000 and during a

reflective period in her life after the death of her brother, Andrew Blue.

Higdon says the blue in the title refers to the sky, where all possibilities

soar and cathedrals represent a place of thought, growth, spiritual expression

that serve as a symbolic doorway in to and out of this world. “As I was writing

this piece, I found myself imagining a journey through a glass cathedral in the

sky. Because the walls would be transparent, I saw the image of clouds and

blueness permeating from the outside of this church,” she writes about Blue Cathedral on her website (www.jenniferhigdon.com).

Ramadanoff likes to introduce YPSO’s

musicians to new works and Blue Cathedral is the second piece of

Higdon’s YPSO has performed in recent years. “It has opportunity for solos for

many instruments. It involves everybody. And at the end there’s a fun effect

that calls for the string players to play Chinese prayer bells and the low

brass and horns players to play tuned crystal water glasses,” says Ramadanoff.

Celebrating his 25th season as Music
Director/Conductor, David Ramadanoff conducts 100 YPSO young musicians who
range in age from 12 to 19 and hail from 32 Bay Area cities in seven counties.

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