Photo by Christoph Trestler
Matilda Hofman will make her debut on Oct. 14 as the Diablo Symphony’s new music director, conducting the season-opening concert featuring her predecessor, trumpet virtuoso Joyce Johnson Hamilton, who retired last year after 31 years of leading the orchestra.
The concert, the first in Diablo's 50th anniversary season, will begin at 2 p.m. in the Lesher Center for the Arts.
Hofman, 33, a lecturer in the UC-Davis music department, was selected in June to lead the Diablo Symphony, the oldest orchestra of professionally trained musicians in Contra Costa County. Hofman is also conductor and artistic director of the Bay Area-based Kreisler Ensemble she founded in 2003.
Hofman is the sixth individual and the second woman to lead the symphony since it was established in the fall of 1962. Like Hamilton, she is one of only some 50 women to hold the music director title among more than 1,000 symphony orchestras in the U. S.
Hamilton will solo in Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto. She will return on March 22 to premiere her composition celebrating the Diablo Symphony’s anniversary.
The progam includes Dances from Ballet Suite No. 1 and Polka from the Age of Gold by Shostakovich, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.