Join the UCR Orchestra under the baton of Ruth Charloff for a concert on Saturday, Feb. 1 at 2 p.m. or on Sunday, Feb. 2 at 7 p.m., at the University Theatre on the UC Riverside campus.
“We’re playing some pretty extroverted repertoire,” Charloff said.
The concert will begin with a short suite of instrumental music from the American composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”
The 1951 “Amahl” was the first opera written for television. Commissioned by NBC, it was the debut production for Hallmark Hall of Fame. It is a Christmas story about a shepherd boy on crutches who is visited by the Three Magi on their way to see the baby Jesus. When the boy offers his crutch as a gift for the Child, his leg is miraculously healed. With his mother’s permission, he journeys with the Magi to Bethlehem.
“The whole piece is suffused with magic, playfulness, and tenderness,” Charloff said.
Listeners will then be treated to Bright Sheng’s “Black Swan” (after Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 118, No. 2). The contemporary composer Sheng has reimagined for the full orchestra a beautiful, passionate piece by Brahms that was originally composed for piano.
The third piece will be Benjamin Britten’s 1941 “Matinées musicales.” “These movements are boisterous, humorous pieces based on tunes by Rossini,” Charloff said.
For listeners, it is touching to know, wrote classical music critic Andrew Porter, the “final ‘Matinée Musicale’ of this series is a witty parody composed from memories of the Rossini vocal exercises that his mother used to sing.”
Britten “selected these different moods and orchestrated them in quirky and different ways to make them his own. It's fun music,” Charloff said.
“Matinées musicales,” like Britten’s 1937 “Soirée musicales” also based on Rossini, was composed for Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre, for a South American tour by the American Ballet. George Balanchine took the music and choreographed the ballet, “Divertimento.”
“The American Ballet was doing these international tours at a time when the United States was eager to demonstrate cultural attractiveness and to make cultural ties with other countries, particularly in this hemisphere,” Charloff said.
After intermission, the orchestra will finish with Antonín Dvořák’s “Symphony No. 8.” Composed in 1889, the melodic ideas came so fast to Dvořák that he complained he couldn’t write them fast enough. The result was a pastoral symphony celebrating the wonderment of being alive in nature. Tying into the first half of the concert, the third movement, a waltz instead of a scherzo, is in the style of Brahms, who had championed Dvořák’s music twelve years earlier.
Dvořák conducted the premiere of his Eighth Symphony in April 1890 as part of his induction into Emperor Franz Josef’s Czech Academy of Science, Literature, and the Arts.
“It is a very sunny, beautiful and exciting symphony. It will fill the basic human need for us to see that kind of joy and beauty in the world,” Charloff said.
The performance of Dvořák is dedicated to the memory of UCR Professor Anthony Ginter (1932-2024), conductor of the UCR Orchestra from 1977 to 1997. Ginter, who died last summer, was a fine violinist as well as conductor, and also a scholar with special affinity for Czech music and Dvořák.
While there might not be an obvious unifying theme to the program, “the selections are poised to make a beautiful program together,” Charloff said. “You know, there's a bit of modernism, and there's very luscious romanticism, and there's wit. The Brahms is going to be more tender and introspective than the Dvořák, and also kind of the opposite of the Britten and the Menotti.”
Given the beauty and expressiveness of the music selections, concertgoers can expect to leave happy and full of warmth, no matter what the winter weather holds for them when they leave the theater.
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the UCR Performing Arts site.
