 Allen GrossMusic Director and Conductor
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Welcome to our new season! Symphonic music is alive and well in Santa Monica! I hope you are looking forward to hearing your orchestra please you, engage you, and challenge you. Your support has been deeply rewarding to all of us. I am particularly proud of the Symphony's dedication to new music by local composers, and have been delighted by the positive welcome our audiences has given to these pieces. Last season noted film composer David Newman composed a concerto for the individual wind players of the Long Beach Symphony. The clarinet movement in particular had a noteworthy success, and showed off the great artistry of the soloist, Gary Bovyer. Gary is of course our longtime Principal Clarinet, so it was an easy decision to ask him to repeat the piece with the Santa Monica Symphony. David Newman is expanding it into a single-movement work that will stand alone as a concert piece. This colorful May program will also include music by Debussy and Ravel. This is a season for wonderful American wind concertos. David Shostac (again, our long-time Principal) will perform the Christopher Rouse Flute Concerto in December, an exciting and moving piece, on a program with Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony. We begin our season with a tribute to England in commemoration of the 150th birthday of Sir Edward Elgar. Cellist Cécilia Tsan will perform his Cello Concerto, and we open with Elgar's most widely-known piece (you'll remember it from your high school or college graduation!). Our tribute to England continues with Britten's atmospheric "Four Sea Interludes" and concludes with the last symphony that Haydn wrote during his sojourn in England, the "London" Symphony. Our third concert puts together two of the great pieces written in the last decades of the nineteenth century -- Brahms' Fourth Symphony and Mahler's Totenfeier, which he later made into the first movement of his "Resurrection" Symphony. And don't forget our second annual Martin Luther King Day concert on January 20, which we inaugurated to great success last January at the SGI Auditorium. We are presenting a very powerful piece by Joseph Schwantner for narrator and orchestra, "New Morning for the World", based on speeches by Dr. King. We hope to see you there! |
ALLEN ROBERT GROSS has been lauded world-wide for his imaginative and probing interpretations of the standard and contemporary orchestra and chamber orchestra repertoires. Beginning his seventeenth year as Music Director of the Santa Monica Symphony, he has established the orchestra as one of the leading community orchestras in the country. Recent guest invitations have also taken him to China and to Cuba, where he conducted the Orquesta Sinfónica de Matanzas as part of the International Festival of Contemporary Music. Locally, he recently conducted the Downey Symphony Orchestra. His position as conductor of the Santa Monica Chamber Philharmonia has resulted in highly acclaimed international tours to Italy, Austria, France, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary. As Director of the Occidental-Caltech Symphony, Gross is also Professor of Music at Occidental College and serves on the music faculty of the California Institute of Technology.
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