St. Matthew’s Music Guild opens its 33rd series of concerts with a program of music by Kodaly, Saint-Saens and Mozart at 8 p.m. on Friday, October 13, at St. Matthew’s Church, 1031 Bienveneda.
Internationally renowned pianist Inna Faliks will be the guest soloist. Called “adventurous and passionate” by The New Yorker, the Ukrainian-born pianist has established herself as one of the most exciting, committed, communicative and poetic artists of her generation.
Faliks is professor of piano at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where she also serves as chair of the Piano Department. After her acclaimed teenage debuts at the Gilmore Festival and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she has performed on many of the world’s great stages, with numerous orchestras, in solo appearances, and with conductors such as Leonard Slatkin and Keith Lockhart.
Interim music director and conductor Tomasz Golka won the 2003 Eduardo Mata International Conducting Competition. He has guest-conducted throughout the world, including the Seattle Symphony, Spoleto USA Festival Orchestra, Warsaw Philharmonic, and Baden Baden Philharmonic, among others. He has served as Chief Conductor of the Colombia National Symphony in Bogotà, Music Director of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, and is currently Music Director of the Riverside Philharmonic.
The concert will begin with Zoltan Kodaly’s colorful Dances of Galánta, a work from 1933 based on folk music from Galánta (now part of Slovakia) that has become the composer’s most frequently performed piece and remains an audience favorite.
Next on the program is the fiery Second Symphony of Camille Saint-Saëns. Known as the “French Mendelssohn,” Saint-Saëns draws obvious parallels in this work with Mendelssohn’s famous “Italian” Symphony.
The program concludes with Ms. Faliks as soloist in Mozart’s beloved Piano Concerto No. 20, a work that audiences are sure to recognize from the film Amadeus.
Admission is $35 or Music Guild Season Pass. The Music Guild offers season passes which are good for all concerts for as little as $200. For more information, visit the Music Guild website at MusicGuildOnline.org or call (310) 573-7421.
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