Celebrate Mother’s Day with the Diablo Symphony and a beautiful program that celebrates all mothers, featuring the pioneering work of African American composer Florence Price, on May 8 at 2:00 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. The program opens with Price’s joyous Symphony No. 3, highlighted by beautiful melodies and sonorities in movements that combine musical idioms found in African, Romantic, and Modernist traditions. The third movement evokes a plantation Juba, a fast-paced dance involving “body percussion,” performed when slaves weren’t allowed to have instruments that might enable them to transmit secret codes. Fast, swirling triple-time themes in the fourth movement, titled “Scherzo: Finale,” portray ceaseless jubilance and demonstrate virtuosity in all orchestral sections.
The program continues with two beautiful works featuring area soprano Heidi Moss Erickson. Antonín Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me” is a lilting and wistful song speaking of a mother’s tears, memories, and influence. Samuel Barber’s masterpiece “Knoxville Summer of 1915” dreamily illustrates James Agee’s prose poem that remembers the comfort and security felt by a child surrounded by a loving family: “All my people are larger bodies than mine … One is my mother who is good to me ….” Yet, in the end, the child recognizes that those loving family members “will not ever tell me who I am,” a quiet acceptance of mystery, fragility, and mortality.
The program ends happily with a medley of numbers by legendary jazz musician, composer, and conductor Duke Ellington, including his famous “Sophisticated Lady,” written originally as an instrumental sketch of three grade-school teachers who, in Ellington’s words, “taught all winter and toured Europe in the summer. To me that spelled sophistication.” Words later added by Tin Pan Alley lyricist Mitchell Parish were approved by Ellington, even though they were “not entirely fitted to my original conception.” Ellington’s last words were said to be, "Music is how I live, why I live, and how I will be remembered," fitting words as we celebrate and remember through music the mothers in our own lives.
Advance tickets are available at the Lesher Center Box Office (1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek, 925-943-7469) and at https://www.diablosymphony.org. Tickets will also be available at the door.
Please remember to call the Lesher Center or check its website (https://www.lesherartscenter.org/) for COVID-19-related requirements in place on the date of this concert for Lesher Center entry and event attendance. This information will also be on the DSO’s web page for this concert.