Classically Trained: Symphony festival celebrates Nowruz
This year, the 11th American Composers Festival takes a cue from the country’s multicultural identity and embraces the Persian-American musical landscape.
The festival, a Pacific Symphony tradition nearly every year since 2000, features three programs taking place March 22 to 27 in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. This year, the celebration is for Nowruz, the ancient Persian New Year festival signifying the coming of spring. Some of the concerts will be in the Costa Mesa-based orchestra’s “Music Unwound” style, which seeks to contextualize the music in a pioneering format.
The Farhang Foundation is a collaborator this year. The nonprofit formed in 2008 in Los Angeles promotes Iranian art and culture.
“For many years now we have been striving to embrace Orange County’s rich and diverse communities through contextual programming,” said Carl St.Clair, the Pacific Symphony’s conductor and leader of the festival, in a prepared statement. “This is a way to connect on a more personal level and also reflects my own wish to enrich lives through the beauty and power of music.”
The first program, “Nowruz — Celebrating Spring,” will have three repeat performances at 8 p.m. March 22 to 24. Symphony officials are billing the series as “exploring intersections between American and Persian music.”
The highlight is the world premiere of “Toward a Season of Peace” by festival composer-in-residence Richard Danielpour. The work is written for orchestra, chorus and soprano solo.
Symphony officials say the work, which features the Pacific Chorale and soloist Hila Plitmann, “brings together sacred texts from different religious traditions, woven together with texts by the great Sufi poet Rumi.”
Danielpour is a first-generation American born in New York City. He said his Iranian-born parents kept a “household [that] was deeply steeped in Persian-Jewish culture.”
“I’ve been known in my work for many years as an American and writing in an idiomatic American way,” Danielpour said in a release, “but my parents were born in Iran ... When my sister and I took the Stanford Achievement Test as kids, there was a place to state your race: Caucasian, Negro or Other. We wrote ‘Other’ because we didn’t think of ourselves as white. Even though we were born in America and brought up that way, we definitely felt the otherness.”
Plitmann, born and raised in Jerusalem, was featured on the soundtrack for 2006’s “The Da Vinci Code.”
“Nowruz — Celebrating Spring” will also feature appearances by the Shams Ensemble and Farhad Mechkat, director of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, who will take turns with St.Clair in leading the Pacific Symphony.
The Shams Ensemble, an Iranian group formed in 1977, has 15 members and features various percussion instruments as well as the tanbour, which is a Kurdish lute, and the daf, a type of drum.
Tickets for the “Nowruz — Celebrating Spring” concerts start at $25.
At 3 p.m. March 25, the orchestra will have its “Classical Connections” concert dubbed “A New Day — Celebrating Nowruz” that examines the new Danielpour piece in depth. Tickets for it start at $25.
Lastly, at 8 p.m. March 27, the Shams Ensemble will take center stage for a concert of traditional Kurdish, Sufi and classical Iranian music. Tickets start at $25.
St.Clair credited the idea of celebrating Nowruz this year for the festival to Pacific Symphony board member Anoosheh Oskouian.
“This year’s [festival] holds a special place in my heart, for it marks the most important celebration in Persian culture,” Oskouian said in a release,” and to have such an amazing orchestra honor and celebrate it makes it even more spectacular.”
For more information on the concerts and a complete program available for download, visit https://www.pacificsymphony.org or call (714) 755-5799.
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A socializing symphony
The Pacific Symphony announced this week the launch of two new social media endeavors: a Tumblr page and mobile phone application.
The new website at pacificsymphony.tumblr.com includes photos, videos, reviews, sound clips, industry news, interviews and program notes. The webmasters say they’re keeping the page casual, with a “loosen-the-tie approach to classical music.”
The mobile app, called Instant Encore, is available to buy on the iPhone and Android markets, or is accessible on a mobile browser. It offers a calendar of upcoming events and guest artist information. It also allows users to ability to buy tickets and access some of the symphony’s Tumblr features.
In addition, the orchestra will also continue to maintain a busy presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
BRADLEY ZINT is a copy editor for the Daily Pilot and a classically trained musician. Email him story ideas at bradley.zint@latimes.com.
