Photo by Vladimir Gurevich
Now that YPSO makes its home in the El Cerrito High School Performing Arts Theater for its 77th season, David Ramadanoff's young musicians have the right venue to rehearse and perform. The Nov. 2-3 debut concerts in the hall will have an ambitious, rich program, including Copland’s El Salón México and Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral.
The centerpiece of the concert, conducted by Ramadanoff, is Rachmaninov's 1909 Piano Concerto No. 3, with Norman Krieger as soloist. The 45-minute piano concerto will be a first-time experience for conductor, 100-piece orchestra, and soloist. Krieger is a professor of piano at the University of Southern California, who has been featured by many American and European orchestras, but has never performed the Rachmaninov concerto:
It’s been a dream of mine my whole life to play it. It reflects the human condition on an epic scale. The first movement is like the history of the piano. Rachmaninov was experimenting with so many things. You hear choral music, Bach and Liszt in it. And using the modern piano’s capabilities, he took advantage of all the overtones, layers of sound, and celebrates sonority. I can’t think of any other concerto that does that before it."
For Ramadanoff too, it's an exciting challenge: "There’s so much to sort out, so much interaction between the pianist and orchestra. The integration of the orchestra and piano is complex."
Higdon’s blue cathedral is her most performed orchestral work. She composed it for the Curtis Institute of Music’s 75th anniversary in 2000 and during a reflective period in her life after the death of her brother, Andrew Blue. Higdon says the blue in the title refers to the sky, where all possibilities soar and cathedrals represent a place of thought, growth, spiritual expression that serve as a symbolic doorway in to and out of this world:
"As I was writing this piece, I found myself imagining a journey through a glass cathedral in the sky. Because the walls would be transparent, I saw the image of clouds and blueness permeating from the outside of this church."
Celebrating his 25th season as music director, Ramadanoff conducts 100 YPSO musicians, who range in age from 12 to 19, coming from 32 Bay Area cities in seven counties. Founded in Berkeley in 1936, YPSO is the oldest youth orchestra in California and the second oldest in the nation. The oldest U.S. youth orchestra is the Portland, OR, Youth Philharmonic, founded in 1924.