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Just because there's "youth" in its name, don't expect the California Youth Symphony to play it safe with performances of perky "Peter and the Wolf"style fare. On May 4 at the Flint Center, the symphony will conclude its season with a dramatic program of works by Shostakovich and Dvorák.
Though the organization is based in Palo Alto, young musicians from all over the Bay Area perform with the California Youth Symphony, which in 2002 celebrated its 50th anniversary of nurturing bright new talents in classical music.
Two such musicians are clarinetist Thomas McCarthy of Hillsborough and cellist Michelle Kwon of Pleasanton, who as the winners of the symphony's soloist competition earned the opportunity to solo with the orchestra. McCarthy will perform the Copland Clarinet Concerto, and Kwon will perform the Dvorák Cello Concerto.
Also on the program are Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15 and Dvorák's The Noon Witch. Symphony No. 15, written a few years before Shostakovich's death in 1975, was one of his last works. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has a subtle undercurrent of themes of mortality.
For his miniature symphony, The Noon Witch, Dvorák took inspiration from a dark fable of a bedtime-story bogeyman that comes to life. In this folktale from Bohemia, a stressed-out mother, driven to the brink by her child's noisy playing, tries to quiet the child by threatening him with a visit from the Noon Witch, a fearsome figure in Bohemian folklore. The problem is, though Mom's threat was meant to be idle, the witch really does appear, and it all goes downhill from there. But any little ones in the audience can relax: Dvorák's retelling of the story, though scary, gets all its drama from the music—no actual appearances from witches required.
The California Youth Symphony performs May 4 at 2:30 p.m. at the Flint Center in Cupertino. (The symphony repeats the same program May 18 in San Mateo.) Tickets are $6$12. For more information, call 650.325.6666 or visit www.cys.org.
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