By Music Director Michael Morgan
Oakland East Bay Symphony's 25th anniversary season continues our tradition of balancing local elements with our interests in world events. We are a symphony orchestra that celebrates the community we live in.
For example, on opening night we join the rest of the world in observing the Verdi and Wagner anniversaries (with soprano Othalie Graham), but along with them is our own Mason Bates, who very much belongs to the world now while also being counted among Oakland composers.
Other Bay Area composers on the season are Conrad Susa (The Blue Hour) and Mary Fineman, a favorite local song writer who will, for the first time, orchestrate some of those songs as part of our New Visions project, supported by the Irvine Foundation.
In future seasons I'm hoping to explore the idea of having song writers in the popular music/Broadway vein write for voice and orchestra in an American version of the orchestra lieder tradition.
Our holiday concert will include commissioning new gospel pieces from local composers. Also appearing will be Oakland product and Naumburg prize-winning cellist David Requiro.
Our "Notes from" series will go to India this year with music of Ravi Shankar and a commission from composer Juhi Bansall.
Interspersed with all of this will be standard rep from Dvorák and Elgar and we'll sum up our performing and education missions by combining the symphony, the youth orchestra, and the symphony chorus in a performance of the Berlioz Requiem (with tenor Thomas Glenn).
The celebration will spill into the following season, when we open with a commissioned work by Clark Suprynowicz (working with playwright Tanya Barfield) set in Oakland during the era of the Black Panthers.