By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily
News
On the eve of its final concerts in the 2010-2011 season Los
Angeles Chamber Orchestra has announced next season’s schedule and reported
that Music Director Jeffrey Kahane’s contract has been extended through the
2013-2014 season.
Next season — the orchestra’s 43rd and Kahane’s 15th as
musical leader — will feature one world premiere and four West Coast premieres
among the seven sets of orchestral concerts, each of which begin with a
Saturday performance in Glendale’s Alex Theatre and conclude the following
evening in UCLA’s Royce Hall.
The latest installment of LACO’s “Discover” series will be
Feb. 25, 2012 at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium. Kahane will first discuss,
and then conduct the orchestra and the USC Thornton Chamber Singers in, Bach’s
Magnificat in D major, BWV 243. Kahane and LACO members will also appear March
8, 2012, on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s “Colburn Celebrity Recital” series
at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Kahane will conduct five of the seven sets of orchestral
concerts and will also appear as soloist in the opening program Sept. 24 and 25
conducting Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 from the keyboard. That program
will also include two of the West Coast premieres: Osvaldo Golijov’s Sidereus (since it’s not a world
premiere one presumes it will be completed on time, unlike his unfinished
Violin Concerto that was supposed to be played last week by the Los Angeles
Philharmonic) and Composer-in-Residence Derek Bemel’s Ritornello for electric guitar and orchestra.
The world premiere by pianist Thomas Andres, the latest
installment in the orchestra’s “Sound Investment” commissioning series, will take
place March 24 and 25, 2012. Andres will also be the soloist in his “recomposition”
of Mozart’s Concerto No. 26 (Coronation).
In what the orchestra is calling a “classical mash-up,” Andres has replaced
Mozart’s incomplete sketches for the left hand with his own creations. Perhaps
to act as a leavening agent, the program will conclude with Mozart’s Symphony
No. 40, K. 550, presumably unaltered.
In one of the other anticipated programs of the upcoming
season, Kahane will conduct his son, Gabriel, for the first time (the program
is cutely titled “Kahane2) on April 21 and 22, 2012 in a work
inspired by the Kahane family history and co-commissioned by the American
Composers Orchestra.
In addition to Kahane, Concertmaster Margaret Batjer will
conduct LACO in the complete Bach Brandenburg Concerti on Nov. 5 and 6 and
principal cellist Andrew Shulman be on the podium Jan. 21 and 22, 2012.
The orchestra will again offer its three-concert “Westside
Connections” chamber music series at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, a
five-concert “Baroque Conversations” series at Zipper Hall in The Colburn
School in downtown Los Angeles and several concerts for families. LACO will
also be involved in the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, which is
being sponsored by the L.A. Phil and the USC Thornton School of Music next
spring. Cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, the festival’s curator, will be the soloist in
Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Roccoco Theme on Dec. 10 and 11.
For a complete list of the orchestra series concerts, download a file by clicking
HERE. For other information, click HERE.
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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved.
Portions may be quoted with attribution.
