The Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra is pulling out all the stops to close its 2018-19 season.
Its “Mostly Mozart” concert this weekend will feature a quartet of international vocal soloists and the 50-voice SASO Choir performing the composer’s behemoth Coronation Mass; a dynamic 7-year-old pianist taking on a movement of Mozart’s First Piano Concerto; and a leading Mexican violinist performing Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto “Turkish.”
With the orchestra at around 50 people, that’s going to be one full stage when SASO performs the concert twice this weekend: In SaddleBrooke on Saturday, April 6, and then at Oro Valley’s St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Sunday.
Conductor Linus Lerner said he wanted the season finale to feel like a celebration, or, more precisely, to hint to the celebration to come when the volunteer orchestra marks its 40th year next fall. The 40th anniversary season opens with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in October. Season highlights include teaming up with high school choirs and the Helios Ensemble to perform Carl Orff’s magnum opus “Carmina Burana” in five concerts in November and a special fully-staged performance of Strauss’ opera “Die Fledermaus” in January.
The Coronation Mass is a perfect big-time celebration piece, with the orchestra trading joyful themes and grand passages with the choir and soloists. Soaring instrumental solos, contrasting vocal soloists and a hopeful sense surge throughout the six major sections of the Mass and take Maestro Lerner to his teen years in his native Brazil.
“The Coronation Mass is very dear to me because it was the first orchestral piece I ever conducted, when I was 19 years old,” he recalled in program notes. “I had worked with vocal groups and choruses, but never had done anything with orchestra. The experience was so enlightening that it awoke my desire to become an orchestral conductor. No matter how many times I perform it, it always sounds fresh to me; maybe because the work shows a young Mozart at the top of his creative form.”
Lerner’s program takes us from Mozart the child prodigy — he wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1 when he was 11 — to the composer as a young man — he was 21 when he penned the Violin Concerto. He was 23 at the time of the Coronation Mass, which SASO will perform with Mexican soprano Liliana del Conde, Brazilian tenor Adriano Pinheiro, and Americans Kristin Dauphinais and Andrew Stuckey.
“It’s a pretty concert because we haven’t done much of Mozart and the Coronation is great,” Lerner said.
One of the concert’s highlights could be when 7-year-old Ayla Moreno takes the stage to perform the first movement of the First Piano Concerto. Lerner said that the girl, who won the junior division of the orchestra’s 2019 Dorothy Vanek Youth Concerto Competition, is just a few years younger than Mozart was when he composed the piece.
She also seems to be quickly building a résumé to support anyone’s notion that she’s a prodigy like Mozart. In her first seven years, the second-grader has been invited to perform on violin and piano at various venues in Tucson and Japan, including the Tucson Annual Japanese Festival, Tucson Folk Festival, Tucson Museum of Art and several churches. In 2017-2018, she won first place at the Merit Scholarship Piano Competition, and has earned medals two years in a row at the Arizona State Piano Competition.
This summer she will revisit the Mozart concerto when she tours Japan with the Tucson Repertory Orchestra.