LIVING COMPOSERS and COMMISSIONED WORKS

The San Diego Symphony is a fierce proponent of innovation and showcasing new works in the thriving classical music art form. Throughout the 2023-24 season, we will feature several world premieres, many of which were commissioned by the San Diego Symphony.

Opening night of the season starts out with a fanfare written to commemorate the renovated Jacobs Music Center Copley Hall by San Diego resident, Texu Kim, and the West Coast Premiere of a new saxophone concerto, cocommissioned by San Diego Symphony, by composer and jazz pianist, Billy Childs, with soloist Steven Banks, that explores aspects of the African-American experience in America as expressed through the lens of poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Amiri Baraka. November continues with new works by Carlos Simon and Vladimir Tarnopolsky, performed as part of the California Festival (see page 13 for more information).

Concerts on January 13 and 14 open with Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour, inspired by the character and power of the lower strings and drawing imagery from two poems to evoke a visual journey for the listener. January continues with Chilean composer Miguel Farías’ Estallido, or explosion, written in the months after a social revolt in Chile in October 2019. Farías describes in the work “a constant energy. This idea of something that does not give more and must explode.”

Two new concertos are featured in February. Latin Grammy® Award-nominated Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz’s Trumpet Concerto receives its West Coast Premiere with soloist Pacho Flores on February 16 and 17. Mason Bates’ new Violin Concerto, which incorporates elements of Romani music, receives its West Coast Premiere on February 24 and 25 with violinist Gil Shaham.

The Masterworks season culminates with two works that stretch the imagination.

Dutch composer Joey Roukens’ 365 in April takes the listener on a journey over exactly 365 measures, passing through ethereal, impressionistic textures, to an almost Mahlerian rhetoric, to minimalist passages with references to pop and jazz, eventually ending exactly at the point where the piece started (not unlike a calendar year).

Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1971 Fairytale Poem was written originally for a children’s radio program based on the fairy tale, “The Little Piece of Chalk,” by the Czech writer Mazourek. The main character is a small piece of chalk that dreams of drawing wonderful castles and beautiful gardens with pavilions and the sea.

Our new series, Currents, is an interdisciplinary chamber music series featuring artists that are exploring the depth of our identities.

The series opens in November with Difficult Grace, a multimedia semi-autobiographical exploration of identity, past/present histories and personal growth drawing inspiration from the Great Migration. Cellist Seth Parker Woods and choreographer/dancer Roderick

George perform music written by Freida Abtan, Monty Adkins, Fredrick Gifford, Ted Hearne, Devonté Hynes a.k.a Blood Orange, Nathalie Joachim, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay.

The next installment of the Currents series in January features the one act chamber opera Tres Minutos composed and conducted by Nicolás Lell Benavides with libretto by Marella Martin Koch. Inspired by a real program that reunites families separated by immigration policies at the U.S.-Mexico Border, but only for three minutes.

The final concert on the Currents series in March is a concert curated by IranianAmerican composer Gity Razaz of music honoring the mystical beauty of Persian culture and the power of women to shape history both past and present.

Each of our Family Concert Series also features works by living composers, starting in November with Jessie Montgomery’s Because, A Symphony of Serendipity, which brings to life Mo Williems' award-winning children’s book, Because, and Arturo Márquez’s Conga del Fuego which is a fiery adventure that uses conga rhythms in an expression of joy.

The February Family Concert tells the story of friendship through Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s musical adaptation of The Mountain that Loved a Bird by Alice McLerran. In April, the Family Concert features Mason Bates' Philharmonia Fantastique, an animated film that follows a magical Sprite exploring the fundamental connections between music, sound, performance, creativity and technology.