“Berkeley Symphony’s 2019-2020 season, the orchestra’s 49th, will feature two world premieres and five works heard for the first time in the Bay Area,” writes Janos Gereben in Tuesday’s (6/18) San Francisco Classical Voice. “Joseph Young will lead his first season as music director, conducting world premieres by Chinese composer Xi Wang and Los Angeles-based composer Derrick Spiva Jr. and the Bay Area premieres of Bryce Dessner’s Voy a Dormir … and Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Become Who I Am…. Trumpeter Sean Jones will be featured in … Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Trumpet Concerto and Gunther Schuller’s Journey into Jazz with the Berkeley High Jazz Combo…. The season opens on Oct. 24, with former UC Berkeley Professor Olly Wilson’s Shango Memory; the return of Conrad Tao as soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major; and [Beethoven’s] Symphony No. 5.… Xi Wang’s yet-unnamed work … is a League of American Orchestras Women Composers Commission, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation…. Spiva’s world premiere work uses a diverse combination of musical styles and influences…. British composer Roxanna Panufnik’s Three Paths to Peace combines Christian, Jewish, and Islamic music traditions to tell the story of Abraham and Isaac.”
Posted June 19, 2019
