Santa Fe Symphony opens 40th season with 'Showcase of the Stars'

Sep. 11—The Santa Fe Symphony will open its 40th season with "Showcase of the Stars" at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 10, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

The concert will open with Ludwig van Beethoven's "Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b."

No other work gave Beethoven more trouble than his only opera, "Leonore," which he retitled "Fidelio" during its final revision. Beethoven's problems with the opera, which occupied him over a span of 11 years and took him through three different versions, are reflected in his problems devising a suitable overture.

The concert also features one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's greatest compositions — his 40th symphony.

The dismal events that befell Mozart during the summer of 1788 are well-known: The death of an infant daughter, the poverty that drove the family into ever-shabbier dwellings, the demands of creditors, and Mozart's own pathetic pleas to friends for financial assistance tell the tale. Mozart was too great an artist to let the events of his life seep into his art, and two of his three final symphonies, composed that summer, are miracles of beauty and strength and repose. Yet the Symphony in G Minor, completed on July 25, is unlike any other music Mozart wrote. It is full of troubled and tense moments that do seem to spring from those "dark thoughts" of those months.

Gina Gillie's "Philharmonic Fanfare" follows, commissioned in 2019 by Adam Stern and the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra. Gillie composed it as a symphonic fanfare for the Seattle Philharmonic's 75th anniversary celebration. The piece, originally scored for an orchestral brass section, employs quartal harmony, snappy fanfare rhythms and flowing melodies. The opening seven-note motif represents the letters in "Seattle," and this motif weaves in and out of the contrasting melodies throughout the duration of the fanfare.

Renowned pianist Anne-Marie McDermott will perform Sergei Prokofiev's "Piano Concerto No. 3."

There were several quite different sides to the young Prokofiev. One was the enfant terrible, who took delight in outraging audiences with abrasive, ear-splitting music. When the premiere of his "Piano Concerto No. 2" in 1913 produced a salvo of jeers and hisses, Prokofiev walked on stage, bowed deeply, and sat down to play an equally assaultive encore. Yet there was another Prokofiev, a very traditional composer drawn to the form and balance of another era.

Prokofiev had been planning for some time to write what he called "a large virtuoso concerto" when he finally found time during the summer of 1921, only a few months after his 30th birthday. That summer he rented a cottage on the coast of France and pulled together themes he had been collecting over the previous decade, some of them dating back to his days as a student in czarist Russia. He was able to weld this variety of thematic material into a completely satisfying whole, a score that fuses his strength and saucy impudence with his penchant for classical order. Completed in October, the concerto was first performed in 1921, with Prokofiev as soloist and Frederick Stock conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

In a career that has spanned over 25 years, McDermott has played concertos, recitals and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. The breadth of her repertoire matches that of her instrument, spanning from Johann Sebastian Bach, Joseph Haydn and Beethoven to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Alexander Scriabin to works by today's most influential composers — Aaron Jay Kernis, Steven Hartke, Joan Tower and Charles Wuorinen, among them. As an artistic director, McDermott leads the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival in Florida, and the Avila Chamber Music Celebration in Curacao. She is a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.