SD Symphony: Folk Auras - Thayer Plays Berg Violin Concerto
Rafael Payare, conductor
Jeff Thayer, violin
San Diego Symphony Orchestra
JIMMY LÓPEZ: Perú Negro
BERG: Violin Concerto
MENDELSSOHN: Symphony No. 3, “Scottish” in A minor, Op. 56, MWV N 18
Three works inspired in very different ways by folk music and the mix of different cultures. Perú Negro (Black Peru), by San Diego Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence Jimmy López, was composed in 2012, and in the words of the composer “showcases my native country’s Afro-Peruvian heritage" while celebrating the exuberant fusion of African and Latin elements in the popular music of his native land. Alban Berg’s last completed work, his mystical Violin Concerto, was written in 1935 “to the memory of an angel”. The angel was Manon, the daughter of Alma Mahler (by her second husband) who had died a few months earlier at the age of 18. Berg includes in his concerto a beautiful folk-tune from the Southern Austrian Catholic region of Carinthia, and a haunting old German Protestant hymn-tune, which Bach had used several times. Mendelssohn’s "Scottish" Symphony, like his Hebrides Overture, was inspired by his youthful trip to Scotland where the young Berliner was overwhelmed by the feeling of a haunting and ancient culture. In his symphony we hear echoes of Scottish traditional music for bagpipes, fiddles and harps, the skipping rhythms of Scottish folk dancing, and Romantic impressions of ruined medieval castles and monasteries.
