Mendocino College will offer its symphony orchestra classes in which both community members and traditional students will enroll as part of the instructional program.

To encourage a love of music, the Symphony has agreed that those under 18, as well as students of any age with an ASB student body card, can attend the concerts at no charge.

The season kicks off with a major fundraising concert performance of Annie Get Your Gun by Irving Berlin at Nelson Family Vineyards on Saturday, August 6th at 7:30 p.m. The 1946 Broadway hit musical originally starring Ethel Merman features Roseanne Wetzel and Pedro Rodelas portraying the fictionalized story of Annie Oakley’s romance with sharpshooter Frank Butler.

Our Own Back Yard! opens the season on September 10th and 11th showcasing original compositions by longtime orchestra members Jeff Ives and Clovice Lewis.

Fantasy Suite for Orchestra by Ives incorporates English Baroque fantasia, Balkan folk music and stately dance from Renaissance Europe with lively polyrhythms and Romantic swoon.

The Score by Lewis is a symphony—for a movie that does not exist—featuring a cello solo in one of its four movements which premiered in full in St. Louis, Missouri, on March 6th, under Leon Burke as part of a worldwide “Global Embrace” concert tour.
The program concludes with Joseph Haydn’s classical piece Symphony No. 103 in E-flat Major nicknamed “The Drumroll” because of the long roll on the timpani with which it begins. Haydn was a prominent and prolific Austrian composer of the Classical period who is known as “The Father of the Symphony.”

Rach III & the New World to be presented on December 3rd and 4th features solo pianist Lawrence Sarabi-Holmefjord on Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, one of the most difficult piano concertos ever written.

Sarabi-Holmefjord and his brother Julius cofounded the Aureus Academy in Singapore, a new music education center inspiring adults to take up a musical instrument for the first time or pick up where they left off as children. The accomplished pianist is quoted as saying, “Everyone deserves the gift of making music; I would make this my mission.”

The concert concludes with Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World,” America’s most popular and famous symphony. Dvořák was a Czech nationalist composer who directed the National Conservatory of Music in America in the late 1800s. After listening to Native American music and African-American spirituals, he was able to transfer that nationalist idiom to American soil in this great work.

The Dances of Argentina on February 11th and 12th brings to the stage Bay Area solo harpist Anna Maria Mendietta playing Alberto Ginastera’s Harp Concerto, Opus 25.

Mendietta and Marcelo Molina, a U.S.A. National Tango Champion, dance tango numbers accompanied by tangos of Argentina by various composers. The symphony performance concludes with Four Dances from Estancia by Alberto Ginastera.

Free school performances the week prior to the concert are being made available to over 1200 local students.

The Sublime, the last concert of the season on May 20th and 21st, features solo cellist David Michael Goldblatt who has been with the San Francisco Symphony since 1978. He will be playing Joseph Haydn’s technically difficult Concerto in D Major.

The Mendocino College Masterworks Chorale concludes this program in a presentation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem, the most performed and well-known work in the chorale repertory.

Adult season tickets for four concerts are $75; season tickets for seniors (65 or older) for four concerts are $65; season tickets for those under 18 or student body cardholders (ASB cards) for four concerts are free! You may go to ukiahsymphony.org to see dates for concerts and more ticket information. To request a 2016-2017 brochure, call 707 462-0236.

Article by Karen Rifkin