Tucson's Music + Festival has a first: a play within a recital

The 15th annual Music + Festival at the University of Arizona this weekend will take audiences into one of classical music’s most fiery love stories and introduce us to one of the country's most beloved and prolific composers.

Augusta Read Thomas will be the guest composer at “Music + Festival 2022: Richard Strauss, George Walker and Augusta Read Thomas,” which runs Saturday, Oct. 22, Sunday, Oct. 23, and Tuesday, Oct. 25. She will speak at a symposium at 2 p.m. Saturday with University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music faculty members Jay Rosenblatt and Matt Mugmon. UA composition professor Daniel Asia will moderate.

Thomas, who teaches composition at the University of Chicago and founded and runs the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition, has composed hundreds of works for orchestra, voice, opera and ballet. Among her accomplishments: When she was 23 in 1989, she was the youngest woman ever awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Later Saturday, the first of five concerts at this year’s festival will be a recital that is more play than concert.

Retired UA piano professor Paula Fan teams up with baritone Jeremy Huw Williams for “The Diva and the Direktor: Passion and Betrayal in the House of Strauss,” which Fan described in an email as “not so much a recital but a little play.”

The diva is late-19th century soprano Pauline Maria de Ahna, who was starring in Richard Strauss's 1894 opera “Guntram.” At a rehearsal, de Ahna storms off stage and locks herself in her dressing room when Strauss, who had been riding the show’s star tenor, didn’t interrupt and correct her. Apparently, she wanted the attention so she threw a tantrum that brought Strauss to her dressing room.

When he returned to the stage moments later, the orchestra players wanted to know how he would discipline his temperamental diva. Simple, he responded: “I am going to marry her.”

The couple wed that same year and remained married until their deaths eight months apart in 1950.

“The Diva and the Direktor” shines a spotlight on how the two polar opposites — the mild-mannered composer and the fiery soprano — became the center of each other’s lives. In 1924, Strauss fictionalized his and de Ahna's relationship in his opera “Intermezzo,” a two-act comic opera based on incidents in the couple's lives.

The “Music + Festival 2022” will be held at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music, 1017 N. Olive Road. For tickets and more info, visit music.arizona.edu/tickets.

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Here’s the schedule. Most events are free unless noted.

Saturday

2 p.m.: Symposium with Thomas, Room 146

4 p.m.: “The Diva and the Direktor,” Holsclaw Hall

7:30 p.m.: Concert featuring pianists Daniel Linder and Fanya Lin, violinist Timothy Kantor, clarinetist Gloria Orozco Dorado, and mezzo-soprano Kristin Dauphinais in Crowder Hall; $15

Sunday

2 p.m.: Concert featuring Arizona Symphonic Orchestra Winds conducted by Yudai Ueda, UA Percussion Studio, trumpeter Jason Carder, organist Pamela Decker and the Fred Fox Graduate Wind Quintet, Holsclaw Hall

4:30 p.m.: Large Ensemble Concert featuring Arizona Symphony Orchestra, UA Wind Ensemble and the Arizona Choir, in Crowder Hall; $15.

Tuesday

7 p.m.: Concert with Amernet String Quartet, making its return to Tucson after playing in the 2019 St. Andrew's Bach Society series, Holsclaw Hall; $15.