Welcome spring with our Festivals concerts!
Our Festivals concerts March 23/24 arrive just after the spring equinox—a significant turning point in the year. As rainy weather gives way to balmy days and light overturns darkness, Santa Cruz Symphony invites you to celebrate the renewal of warmth and the promise of spring. Join us as we experience festive, passionate, and occasionally explosive works by Granero, Schumann, and Stravinsky. Learn more about our featured soloist and composer here.
José González Granero wrote his Matsuri Overture in 2017 after witnessing ancient traditions blending with modern life at Kyoto’s Ebisu Festival. Matusuri means festival in Japanese, carrying connotations of comfort, prayer, and gratitude. Dedicated to the god of good luck and business prosperity, Ebisu Festival is a time when thousands of people enact rituals to bring success, asking for Ebisu’s blessing to overcome adversity with cheerful perseverance. Granero’s overture welcomes us into the beauty and ambience of Kyoto during this unique celebration.
Written in 1850, Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto demonstrates Schumann’s compositional genius through an extended emotional arc, a powerful sense of character development, and hidden musical messages. Never performed during Schumann’s lifetime, this “lost masterpiece” has since come to be known as one of the great Romantic works for the cello. Award-winning featured soloist Gaeun Kim will dazzle us as she conveys the poetic depth of this entrancing concerto all the way to its thrilling conclusion.
In Petrushka, Igor Stravinsky finds his true voice, inventing ways to express physical movement in musical terms. The composer was only 28 years old when Ballet Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev approached him in 1910 for another collaboration following Stravinsky’s success with The Firebird. Praised as a feat of sophisticated theatrical folklorism, Petrushka tells the story of a deadly love triangle between puppets who come to life. Petrushka is a mischievous clown, a representative of the trickster archetype who disrupts the status quo. We’ll follow his exhilarating journey and listen as Petrushka has the last laugh via the recurring “Petrushka chord.”
Come share the magic of these lush compositions!
Saturday 3/23 at 7:30 PM (Pre-concert talk at 6:30)
Civic Auditorium in Santa Cruz
Sunday 3/24 at 2 PM (Pre-concert talk at 1)
Henry J. Mello Center in Watsonville