Christine Lamprea, a Youth Orchestras of San Antonio (YOSA) alum and former student of San Antonio Symphony principal cellist Ken Freudigman, returns to San Antonio this week with a world premiere tucked into her cello case. She’ll be performing composer Jeffrey Mumford’s concerto titled of fields unfolding...echoing depths of resonant light.
The work was written in tribute to the late Elliott Carter, whose music inspires Lamprea. “It’s just endless,” Lamprea says of Carter’s music, “the same way that the study of Bach is endless.”
Mumford, who studied with Carter, was described by the New York Times as having “an unerring knack for fashioning rigorous works as changeable as cloudscapes, bursting with color, nuance and poetry.” Lamprea says she was pleasantly surprised by Mumford’s call. “He admired [the fact] that I play a lot of modern music, so he just called me up! He said, ‘Would you like me to write a concerto for you?’ and I was like, ‘yeah, sure!’”
Lamprea says she hopes that San Antonio’s familiarity and trust with her will help them listen to the new music with open ears. Mumford’s concerto premiere is part of the San Antonio Symphony’s 2016 Las Américas Festival, and is on the same program as music by Leonard Bernstein (Divertimento), Argentinian tango master Astor Piazzolla (Tangazo), and John Adams, whose 1991 piece El Dorado was inspired by the changing natural landscape of California.
The concert takes place on January 22 and 23 at 8 p.m. at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts. Additional details on this weekend’s concert can be found online at the San Antonio Symphony's website.
