THE CALIFORNIA YOUTH SYMPHONY 56TH SEASON
'BOLD, BRASSY, & BEAUTIFUL'
AND A SUMMER TOUR TO JAPAN
"I once wrote that the California Youth Symphony was 'one of the best of the world's youth symphonies, certainly.' That opinion is even more 'certain' after hearing the ensemble's concert Sunday at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino."
– Keith Kreitman, San Mateo County Times, May 15 2007
The award-winning California Youth Symphony, under the direction of Maestro Leo Eylar, offers its 56th concert season in the San Franicsco Bay Area, to be followed by its third tour to Japan. The season, highlighted by award-winning soloists and a free, holiday "gift of music" to the community, will feature some of the most colorful orchestral showpieces of the post romantic and 20th century repertoire by composers imbued with their sense of nationalistic identity.
This season's first concerts (2:30 p.m. Sunday, November 11 in Cupertino's Flint Center and Sunday, November 18 in the San Mateo Performing Arts Center) comprise a potpourri of intense orchestral color. The French composer Maurice Ravel travels "south of the border" on the Iberian Peninsula to capture the vivacity of Spain in Rhapsodie Espagnole. The grandfather of all brilliant orchestrations, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, presents musical scenes from the Arabian Nights in his scintillating tone poem, Scheherezade. Also featured will be California Youth Symphony Young Artist Competition winner Angela Hwang as piano soloist in Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
The annual California Youth Symphony Holiday Concert will take place on Sunday, December 9 at 2:30 p.m. in Smithwick Theatre on the campus of Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. Performed by the CYS Senior Orchestra and Associate Orchestra, this year's holiday concert will be a free-of-charge gift of music to the community, offering an array of classical and seasonal favorites for the season.
The March concerts (2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 9 in the San Mateo Performing Arts Center and Sunday, March 16 in Cupertino's Flint Center) are given over to three giants of the twentieth century: Gershwin, Ravel, and Shostakovich, as The California Youth Symphony performs Gershwin's An American in Paris, and the first symphony from the pen of 19-year-old Dimitri Shostakovich. CYS Young Artist Competition winner Vivian Fu will be soloist in Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2, the ultimate masterpiece from his globetrotting days as a performer, before returning to his Russian homeland. Three distinctly contrasting nationalistic compositional styles will be expressed in the program for the California Youth Symphony's concerts at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday May 11 at Cupertino's Flint Center and Sunday, May 18 at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center. You can't get more American than William Schuman's setting of Charles Ives' Variations on "America." Prokofiev's Suite from "The Love for Three Oranges" is most distinctively Russian, while the Englishman Benjamin Britten's variations and fugue on a theme by Henry Purcell in The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra pulls together three hundred years of the English musical aesthetic. Winners of the annual CYS Senior Soloist Competition will also be showcased in March.'
As a special bonus this season, at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 22 at the Spangenberg Theatre in Palo Alto, the California Youth Symphony will preview music that CYS will bring on its concert tour to Japan later in June. Works by Rimsky-Korsakov, George Gershwin, and others will be performed.
