Dear Friends,
Welcome to the Santa Monica Symphony's 1999-2000 season! While I leave it to others to argue whether the year 2000 is the last year of the old century or the first year of the new one, we can all agree that this is the last season of the 1900s. And to bring the 1900s to a close, our theme for the year reflects "The American Century", the past hundred years when American composers began to make their mark on the orchestral repertoire.
Our December program will be an all-American concert, featuring two of our most significant and beloved composers: George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. Pianist Brian Pezzone will perform Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F; also on the program will be Copland's suite from his ballet Billy the Kid, and to open, we perform Charles Ives's rambunctious Variations on "America" in the brilliant transcription by William Schuman. This season we will also be performing recently-composed concertos by two of the more important composers of our generation, the Clarinet Concerto by Dan Welcher and the Violin Concerto by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. We are fortunate to feature the return of clarinetist Gary Bovyer and violinist Lawrence Sonderling for these wonderful works.
Our third concert, though not an "American" one, presents one of the greatest works of the century, one which both bade farewell to the previous century and looked forward into the twentieth: Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Performing this work is both a challenge and an honor for all involved, and we are especially looking forward to our two soloists, tenor Jonathan Mack and mezzo-soprano Adrien Raynier.
We do hope that you will enjoy this exciting season, which also opens with Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony and closes with Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel
Best wishes,
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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