Day 1063: World premiere
Feb. 16th, 2023 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday I went to the symphony to see the world premiere of Angélica Negrón's first symphony, Sinfonía Isleña. It's the result of a project by our music director / conductor, Francesco Lecce-Chong. Most composers today are limited to writing only short pieces if they have any hope of getting them performed, so our symphony (working with Francesco's other symphony in Santa Rosa) has commissioned four proper symphonies from composers who hadn't written one before, and this is one of them. A world premiere!
Angélica Negrón is from Puerto Rico but lives in New York City, so she wrote the piece inspired by nostalgia for her homeland. The four movements are about its skies, ocean, mountains, and flowers, respectively. It was quite interesting, as she uses the regular orchestra instruments to make unusual sounds and supplements them with electronics. The sky movement was mostly a single chord, sometimes with various embellishments, and also with a sound like... crinkling bubble wrap! The ocean movement was quite pretty, as was the mountain movement, which had patterns of sounds passed back and forth between sections of the orchestra. The floral movement was plinky and had far more brass than I would have associated with plants, but it was pretty cool too.
I had assumed that this piece would be the highlight of the concert, which started with a Brahms overture and after the intermission had the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, performed by a 16-year-old girl from Boston who's won lots of awards. I was wrong. The girl was the highlight. Wow. Her playing was SO beautiful that I literally had to keep reminding myself to breathe. It wasn't just that she was highly skilled at the difficult parts - it was the exquisite beauty of the high notes and the quiet, slow parts. She received an immediate standing ovation and was called back to the stage four times. Wow. I was dazed afterwards.
Angélica Negrón is from Puerto Rico but lives in New York City, so she wrote the piece inspired by nostalgia for her homeland. The four movements are about its skies, ocean, mountains, and flowers, respectively. It was quite interesting, as she uses the regular orchestra instruments to make unusual sounds and supplements them with electronics. The sky movement was mostly a single chord, sometimes with various embellishments, and also with a sound like... crinkling bubble wrap! The ocean movement was quite pretty, as was the mountain movement, which had patterns of sounds passed back and forth between sections of the orchestra. The floral movement was plinky and had far more brass than I would have associated with plants, but it was pretty cool too.
I had assumed that this piece would be the highlight of the concert, which started with a Brahms overture and after the intermission had the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, performed by a 16-year-old girl from Boston who's won lots of awards. I was wrong. The girl was the highlight. Wow. Her playing was SO beautiful that I literally had to keep reminding myself to breathe. It wasn't just that she was highly skilled at the difficult parts - it was the exquisite beauty of the high notes and the quiet, slow parts. She received an immediate standing ovation and was called back to the stage four times. Wow. I was dazed afterwards.