Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra is going to the opera with its “Opera and Songs From Around the World” concert this weekend.
Meanwhile, Tucson Symphony Orchestra is bringing Prokofiev’s traditional children’s piece to its Masterworks series along with the world premiere of a piece the orchestra commissioned from a rising young composer.
The TSO first heard of Xavier Muzik when it performed a public reading of his “Somatic” for Orchestra in 2022 as part of the American Composers Orchestra’s “EarShot” program. The orchestra was so impressed it commissioned him to write “Ease in Apathy,” which the orchestra will perform three times this weekend at Catalina Foothills High School.
Korean American lyric soprano Yunah Lee will be among the guest vocalists at Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra’s “Opera and Songs From Around the World” this weekend.
SASO’s “Opera and Songs” concert features a cast of guest soloists — lyric soprano Yunah Lee, mezzo-soprano Kristin Dauphinais and tenor Justin Kroll, winner of the SASO Prize at the eighth Linus Lerner International Voice Competition — joining Music Director Linus Lerner and the orchestra for a concert of “fiery rhythms of Spain,” “soaring melodies of Italy” and “the soul-stirring sounds of Eastern Europe” in the latest installment of the orchestra’s season-long “Musical Journeys” series.
Lerner paired the trio’s opera arias with the evocative overture from Antônio Carlos Gomes’s “Il Guarany” and the flamenco-rich Ritual Fire Dance from Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s “El amor brujo.”
Italian composer Pietro Mascagni’s Intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana” will offer a contrast to the concert’s intense dramatic arias, while Korean composer Sung-hwan Choi’s “The Arirang Fantasy” will showcase the emotionally captivating soundscape of blending traditional Korean melodies with Western classical influences.
Of course, any excursion into the world of opera would not be complete without a little taste of Bizet’s “Carmen.” The exuberant Spanish bullfighting-themed “Les Toréadors” sets the stage for the drama and passion of “Carmen.”
Lerner has programmed a dozen operatic arias, including from Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” Puccini’s “La Bohème,” Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila,” Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus,” Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” and Franz Lehár’s “The Merry Widow.”
SASO will perform the concert at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 8, at SaddleBrooke’s DesertView Performing Arts Center, 39900 S. Clubhouse Drive; and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 9, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 7575 N. Paseo del Norte. Tickets are $35 for SaddleBrooke, $28 for Tucson at sasomusic.org/buy-tickets.
‘Peter and the Wolf’ and a world premiere
Tucson Symphony Orchestra usually programs Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” on it’s Just for Kids series or slips excerpts into its youth concerts.
But this weekend, it’s promoting “Peter and the Wolf” to the adult’s table.
The work, which Prokofiev composed in 1936 specifically for children, casts instruments as characters in a Russian folk tale that will be narrated this weekend by Sophie Gibson Rush.
Prokofiev wanted to introduce children to instruments in the orchestra and the notes they played. But TSO Music Director José Luis Gomez recognized that the piece has wide appeal to adults so why not put it on the orchestra’s chamber music series?
“Peter and the Wolf” follows the world premiere of Xavier Muzik’s “Ease in Apathy,” which the orchestra commissioned not long after performing his work in 2022.
In 2023, Muzik won the Michael Morgan Prize in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s third annual Emerging Black Composers Project, which came with a $15,000 commission to write a piece for the San Francisco Symphony.
This weekend’s Masterworks program also includes Mussorgsky’s stormy “Night on Bald Mountain” and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9, considered to be his most classical work.
Performances will be at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 8, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 9, at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive. Tickets are $50-$88 through tucsonsymphony.org.
