A spectacular concert featuring two masterworks by Johannes Brahms and a world premier by Ventura faculty Robert Lawson will be held at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center on Saturday, April 17, at 8:00 p.m. This showcase concert for the Ventura College Music Department will feature the Ventura College Symphony, the Ventura College Choirs, and Ventura College music faculty and soloists. On the program will be the magnificent Brahms Double Concerto with popular local virtuosos Virginia Kron on cello and Yue Deng on violin, and music director Burns Taft conducting the Ventura College Symphony. The Ventura College Symphony, Choir, and soloists will perform Brahms’ German Requiem, with Lisa Hofer, soprano, and Randy Crenshaw, baritone, as featured soloists. Elizabeth Helms, director of the Ventura College Choirs, will conduct. Professor Robert Lawson will conduct the premier of his own composition, Tumaini.
“Tumaini” is the Swahili word for “hope.” Lawson, founder and longtime musical director of the Santa Clarita Youth Orchestra, originally conceived Tumaini as a work for youth orchestra. In the Ventura College Symphony World Premier performance, this now complex and challenging piece will use the vivid colors of each section of the orchestra, combined with the drive of complicated rhythms and percussion to express the hope of youth and a renewed sense of hope in the world.
The Double Concerto was composed late in Brahms’ career as a “work of reconciliation” for a friend from whom he was estranged, the great violinist Josef Joachim. The work was a showpiece for Joachim and cellist Robert Hausmann, and the three performed the piece many times together. The concerto contains many testimonials to Brahms’ friend, including the exciting Hungarian finale. Virginia Kron and Yue Deng, featured soloists in the April 17 performance, are frequent collaborators in recital and chamber music concerts around southern California.
The German Requiem was composed when Brahms was a young man in his thirties and is the work that made him famous. It includes the well known “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place.” The Ventura College Choirs will be joined by guests from the Gold Coast Concert Chorus and the Ventura Master Chorale as they perform the challenging and beautiful piece. Also joining the choir and orchestra will be soprano Lisa Hofer, a performer familiar to Ventura County audiences, who has graced the stages of the Ventura Chamber Music Festival and the Ventura College Opera, among others, and baritone Randy Crenshaw, who has performed as featured vocalist with every major choral organization in southern California, as well as on hundreds of Hollywood films, television programs, and commercials.
Tickets are priced $20, $15, $10, and $5, and are on sale at the OxPAC box office, 800 Hobson Way, Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., by telephone at 805-486-2424 or at www.Etix.com.
Free tickets are being made available to local high school music students through their music instructors. Music teachers interested in obtaining tickets for their students should call the Ventura College Music Department at 805-654-6309. |
