Dear Friends,
One of the very special aspects of the Santa Monica symphony is its artistic collaboration between the volunteer community musicians and the world-class professionals who lead our string, woodwind and brass sections. In the Los Angeles area, the top professional musicians are truly world class, and this season we have the pleasure of presenting three of the best!
Richard Todd, internationally acclaimed concert, jazz, and recording artist who resides in pacific Palisades, will return for his second solo appearance since I have been Music Director. He will be playing Strauss' Second Horn Concerto (last time he played the first one with us!) on March 28. Rose Corrigan, our Principal Bassoonist, will play Weber's Bassoon Concerto on October 18. And to end our season on May 16, a new work is being written for our popular Concertmaster David Stenske. The composer, Michael Jon Fink, is on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts; the Symphony performed his Mind of Winter for Saxophone and Orchestra to an enthusiastic audience response a few years ago.
We are also proud to feature one of Santa Monica's most promising musical talents on our December 14 Family Concert: Andrew von Oeyen. Andrew recently graduated from the Crossroads School and will be attending the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Andrew has already performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the San Juan Islands Chamber Music Festival, and in other important venues. He will be playing the ever-popular Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2.
Our concerto soloists are the icing on a wonderful layer cake of symphonic repertoire which includes Beethoven's Fifth, Shostakovich's Tenth, and Dvorak's Sixth symphonies. I'm sure that you will enjoy the season and hope to see you at all our concerts!
Allen Robert Gross
ALLEN ROBERT GROSS Music Director and Conductor
Music Director/Conductor of the Santa Monica Symphony since 1991, Allen Gross continues to delight the public with enthusiastic and well-prepared performances of a challenging and diverse repertory that embraces the new and the old, the familiar and the unfamiliar. A native New Yorker, he studied with Pierre Monteux, Walter Susskind, Sandor Salgo and Hans Swarowsky, beginning at Queens College and UC/Berkeley before earning his doctorate at Stanford and continuing at the Vienna Music Academy and the American Institute of Orchestra Conducting. From 1972-1978, he directed the Heidelberg Castle Festival, also serving as conductor of the Junges Kammerorchester Heidelberg and in the opera houses of Freiburg and Aachen. Back in the United States, Gross directed the orchestra and opera programs at the University of Louisville before joining the music faculty at Occidental College in 1983 to serve as Director of the Occidental-Caltech Symphony Orchestra. He has since served as Music Director/Conductor of the Pasadena Young Musicians Orchestra and the Pasadena Summer Youth Chamber Orchestra and has appeared with the Los Angeles Monday Evening Concerts, the Minnesota Composers Forum, broadcast concerts from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and honors orchestras in California and Nevada. Last Season, Mr. Gross returned from China, where he conducted a concert with the orchestra of the Shenwang Conservatory of Music. The past two summers, he has traveled and concertized in the Czech Republic and other Eastern European countries with members of the Santa Monica Symphony.
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