Former Tucsonan Paola Prestini remembers sitting at her mother's piano, playing around with a tune or a melody.
She hated the piano, but her mother insisted she practice. So when Mom left her with the nanny, Prestini practiced — but not necessarily the music Mom wanted to hear.
"I could play Beethoven or Prestini and (the nanny) would think it was all beautiful," she recalled. "Half the time I was not practicing. I was just kind of fiddling around with my own music."
This weekend, the Tucson Symphony Orchestra will fiddle around with Prestini's music when it performs the world premiere of her four-minute work "Amanecer." The piece opens the orchestra's MasterWorks Latin Fiesta concert, which also features the TSO debut of in-demand Tucson vocalist mezzo-soprano Kristin Dauphinais.
Prestini is viewing the performance as her long-awaited homecoming, the first time she has returned to Tucson in a professional capacity.
"I've always wanted to be able to come home, bring some of the things I've learned," said the Juilliard graduate, who splits her time between New York City, where she runs the nonprofit VisionIntoArt, and San Francisco, home base of her cellist husband Jeffrey Zeigler's Kronos Quartet.
Her husband will tag along this weekend, and both will attend the concerts. They also will baptize their 2-month-old son, Tommaso Mareo.
Prestini, 33, said she wrote "Amanecer" several years ago for an orchestra in her native Italy. She grew up in Arizona after her father, Guiseppe Prestini II, moved them to Nogales, Ariz., to open a U.S. arm of his family's woodwinds-manufacturing company.
TSO's resident composer Dan Coleman found the piece on Prestini's Web site and suggested she tweak it for the orchestra. She added a section and rewrote parts of it so that it is, in essence, a new piece.
She described it as lyrical, with counterpoints that have "different bodies of the orchestra bringing forward different melodies." The piece has flashes of moodiness characteristic of much of Prestini's works, and a strong sense of lyricism, a nod to her admiration for folk songs.
"It is really about the sunrise. It's my language, which is really lyrical and driven by line and by song," she said.
"I would love to write an original piece for the TSO one day," Prestini added.
Dauphinais has been in Tucson for about five years and has performed with several noted ensembles, but never the TSO — until this weekend. She will perform two De Falla works, including his "Seven Popular Spanish Songs."
"This is the first time I will perform them with an orchestra," the 35-year-old mother of one said. "They are really wonderful. The poems are all folk poetry. They are very visceral."
Dauphinais and her husband, pianist Michael Dauphinais, often perform as a duo, and each has an active solo career. For her, that includes an upcoming Bach concert at the University of Arizona.
With the TSO she also will perform De Falla's "El amor brujo" Ballet Suite, which she performed with the former Catalina Chamber Orchestra.
"It's much more of a kind of a tapestry where the voice is featured. It takes this one character through this journey where she's had this bad relationship with this gypsy lover. He has died but he is haunting her from the afterlife," she said.
If you go
Tucson Symphony Orchestra "Latin Flair"
• Featuring: Mezzo-soprano Kristin Dauphinais.
• When: 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m Sunday.
• Where: Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive.
• Tickets: $30-$40 through the TSO, www.tucson symphony.org or 882-8585.
• Program: Prestini's "Amanecer" (world premiere). De Falla's "Seven Popular Spanish Songs." De Falla's "El amor brujo" Ballet Suite. Ginastera's Variaciones concertantes.
