Diablo Symphony Presents Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and a New Work by Jean Ahn

The Diablo Symphony Orchestra brings Igor Stravinsky’s groundbreaking Rite of Spring to Walnut Creek on March 3, 2024, at 2:00 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts. Expanded to accommodate Stravinsky’s score calling for nearly 100 musicians, the orchestra will include multiple flutes and clarinets in different ranges; four oboes; two English horns; four bassoons, two contrabassoons; eight French horns; five trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, a full complement of violins, violas, and cellos; and eight string basses. New sounds and energetic polyrhythms are created in the percussion section by six timpani (including a piccolo timpano) shared by two timpanists, a tam-tam, a bass drum, crash cymbals, antique cymbals, a tambourine, and a stroked washboard. The program also features a new commissioned work, “Many Hues of Green,” by San Francisco composer Jean Ahn and Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor featuring Starla Breshears, this season’s winner of the DSO’s Yen Liang Young Artist Competition. Breshears, age 16, is a precollege student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, studying cello with Jean-Michel Fonteneau. She was the 2023 Stulberg International String Competition Bronze Medalist, and has also won first prize in more than a dozen solo competitions, including Grand Prize in the Diablo Valley College/Holy Names University Young Artist Competition. Elgar’s meditative concerto, composed in the aftermath of World War I, adds to the power of a program that highlights not only a new work but also two masterworks of the symphonic literature.
 
Tickets are available at the Lesher Center for the Arts box office (925-943-7469; 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek) or online through the DSO’s website at https://www.diablosymphony.org. Discounts for youth and groups of 10+ seniors are available, and children 12 and under are admitted free of charge to all concerts. Tickets will also be available at the door.