“It requires more optimism than usual to run an arts organization these days,” writes Michael Zwiebach in Friday’s (4/24) San Francisco Classical Voice. “Yesterday, April 23, the California Symphony announced its coming season, and it looks adventurous and interesting.… It starts … with Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, with [pianist] Adam Golka as soloist; Haydn’s Symphony No. 82 … and a work by Marianna Martines (1744–1812), who was a protégée of the poet and librettist Metastasio…. Music Director Donato Cabrera had apparently long wanted to do a concert centered on music about birds and [in a program] centered around Igor Stravinsky’s [‘Firebird’] ballet score, the orchestra will also welcome cellist Joshua Roman to play Mason Bates’s Cello Concerto (2014)…. Ottorino Respighi’s Gli uccelli (The birds) and Saqqara Bird by Australian composer Melody Eötvös round out the bird-themed concert…. The season finale … is built around Dmitri Shostakovich’s mighty Fifth Symphony. In the first half of the show, concertmaster Jennifer Cho plays Jennifer Higdon’s … Violin Concerto … and composer in residence Viet Cuong … unveils his first work for the orchestra.” Also planned in 2020-21 are Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2, Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments.
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