‘Happy concerto’ highlights next Modesto symphony performance

Expect joy at the next Modesto Symphony Orchestra performance, where the featured soloist promises a “happy concerto” as opposed to the more dark and exhausting pieces.

Violinist Angelo Xiang Yu will perform Camille Saint-Saëns’ Violin Concerto No. 3 with the symphony Friday and Saturday, April 15 and 16, at Gallo Center for the Arts. Speaking from his home in Boston last week, Yu said that while the concerto is not performed as often as others, “It’s a really great piece.”

Violin Concerto No. 3, composed in 1880, “is one of Saint-Saëns’ most elegant works, a display of virtuosity without the excessive showmanship that dogged so many late-nineteenth-century violin concertos,” according to program notes on the MSO website.

“The audience, after the performance, will be filled with joy,” Yu, 27, said, adding that the piece does come with its challenges.

“You have to make something difficult, make it sound easy … you have to have a smile on your face, but actually you are dealing with most challenging techniques, both technically and musically,” he said.

Born in Inner Mongolia, Yu moved to Shanghai when he was 11, training at the Shanghai Conservatory. He came to the United States at age 19 and currently is studying at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

The winner of the Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition in 2010, he also was the youngest prize winner ever at the Wieniawski International Violin Competition in 2006. He performs globally, with orchestras, chamber ensembles and in recitals.

In addition to Yu’s appearance at the Gallo Center, MSO Director David Lockington will lead the orchestra in Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” The concert will open with Alexander Miller’s “Scherzo Crypto,” composed in 2014 on commission from the San Antonio Symphony. Miller will attend both MSO performances.

Those two pieces are a good fit together.

“Dvorak came to the U.S. to create a conservatory to train American composers at the same time that Carnegie Hall was opened,” Lockington said in an email. “Without his influence we may not have Alexander Miller’s new work, ‘Scherzo Crypto,’ today.”

Dvorak’s piece provided a template for American composers hunting for a unique American sound, Lockington said: “Folk song was recommended by the master – Native American and African American – and since then popular and experimental music has provided the rhythmic drive and color that American composers explore so skillfully today.

“The New World Symphony contains some of Dvorak’s best-loved melodies and evokes an adventurous spirit through driving rhythms, taut development and powerful climaxes.”

Meanwhile, there’s a puzzle to be solved in Miller’s work.

“This is more involved than hearing the duck in the belly of the wolf in ‘Peter and the Wolf’ but it is solvable if you love numbers and crossword puzzles – as Alexander Miller does,” Lockington said. “No worries if you don’t get the joke in the scherzo – it’s still a brilliant and fun piece.”

As for the Saint-Saëns work, Yu said he’s performed it with two orchestras over the past year and found each performance to be “a totally different experience, even if I performed (it) in two consecutive days. The feeling will not be the same.”

While traveling constantly to perform with a variety of orchestras has its challenges – “Basically what you see is the airport, hotel, concert hall,” he said – Yu enjoys meeting other musicians and finding the different artistry among conductors.

He particularly enjoys playing with local groups such as the Modesto symphony.

“I’ve performed with all different kinds of symphonies. … While I enjoy playing with all sorts of groups, it’s really a different feeling with a local orchestra,” Yu said. “Actually I love it; I can feel the distance between the orchestra and audience is really closer.”

Audience and artists, he said, know each other in a local group, as opposed to those in large cities such as in Boston, where people come from a variety of places.

“A local orchestra,” he said, “is quite intimate.”

This story was originally published April 7, 2016 at 1:34 PM with the headline "‘Happy concerto’ highlights next Modesto symphony performance."