So many choices: Busy week for Tucson classical music

We have a busy week ahead for Tucson classical music. Here’s what you need to know.

Guest conductor leads SASO

Egyptian conductor Ahmed El Saedi will be at the podium when the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra performs the second concert of its 2022-23 season this weekend.

El Saedi, who also moonlights as a composer, is the longtime music director and principal conductor of the Cairo Symphony Orchestra. SASO Music Director Linus Lerner said he met El Saedi several years ago at a music festival in Italy.

El Saedi will lead the volunteer Tucson ensemble in a program that includes Mendelssohn’s “Hebride” Overture and Dvorák’s brilliant Symphony No. 8. Italian cellist Francesco Mariozzi, whose career spans orchestras, film and theater in his native Italy, also will join SASO for Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D major.

The orchestra will perform the concert twice this weekend: at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12, at SaddelBrooke’s DesertView Performing Arts Center, 39900 S. Clubhouse Drive; and 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 7650 N. Paseo Del Norte, in Oro Valley. Tickets are $30 for SaddleBrooke through tickets.saddlebrooketwo.com; $25, free for those 17 and younger, for Oro Valley through sasomusic.org.

For more information, call 520-308-6226.

Symphonic Winds salute vets

When you host an event every year it falls under the category of an “annual event.”

When you do it for 37 years — sans the COVID-19 pause, which should never be held against anyone’s record of longevity — you are a tradition.

On Friday, Nov. 11, Tucson Conductor László Veres will lead his volunteer Arizona Symphonic Winds in their 37th Veterans Day Concert.

“We have been playing continuously since 1986; 2021 Covid-19 year doesn’t count,” said Veres, who will don his ubiquitous John Phillip Sousa uniform for the occasion. “It has become a Tucson tradition.”

The orchestra’s “Salute to Veterans” concert on Veterans Day will feature Catalina Foothills High School senior Tyler Kebo as soloist on the marimba in a program that includes Barry Kopetz’s “American Sketches,” Tucson composer Mark Wolfram’s “Colonial Scenes,” Robert W. Smith’s “American Flourish” and marches by John Philip Sousa.

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The Winds also will play tribute to all members of the armed forces past and present with the “Armed Forces Salute,” a medley of songs representing all branches of service.

The 37th Annual Veterans Day Concert will begin at 2 p.m. Friday at Catalina Foothills High School Auditorium, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive. Admission is free.

Arizona Friends honor pianist

Two of the three members of the esteemed Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio will honor their late partner Joseph Kalichstein in a special concert with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music on Wednesday, Nov. 16.

Kalichstein, an award-winning concert pianist who founded the trio in 1977, died last March at age 76.

Pianist Anna Polonsky will take Kalichstein’s seat when his longtime trio-mates violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson and violist/composer Nokuthula Ngwenyama perform a concert curated by Kalichstein.

The program features the Arizona premiere of Ngwenyama’s new work “Elegy” for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello, co-commissioned by Arizona Friends and several other presenters including the Kennedy Center and written in response to the social reckoning of 2020.

In program notes published by the Kennedy Center, where the quartet performed the concert on Oct. 18, Kalichstein called “Elegy” “a heart-wrenching tribute to the victims of racial prejudice and to the struggle for equality and justice” and said “there is something very fitting about” pairing “Elegy” with Dvorák’s E-flat Piano Quartet.

“Astonishingly, (Dvorák) was an early champion of American Black composers. And, as the head of the newly established National Music Conservatory in Lower Manhattan, he insisted that it would be open to women and people of color (not a given in the 1880s!),” Kalichstein wrote.

Wednesday’s concert, which also includes Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, begins at 7:30 p.m. at Leo Rich Theater, 260 S. Church Ave. Tickets are $32, $10 for students with ID, through arizonachambermusic.org or by calling 520-577-3769.