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Event
Ukiah Symphony Presents Margie Rice Conducts!
Please note that students with an ASB card, those under 18 and people who were victims of the North Bay/Mendocino or Lake County fires in October will be given a free ticket at the door, beginning 30 minutes prior to the start of the December 2/3 concerts.
More information about the concert is provided below in the press release/article by Roberta Werdinger.
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The Ukiah Symphony presents Margie Rice Conducts! on the weekend of December 2nd and 3rd at the Mendocino College Center Theatre. This conducting debut by the orchestra's longtime and beloved concertmistress and lead violinist features Elena Casanova, piano; Patricia Rice Agee and Jessica Rice Vierra, violin; and Elizabeth Rice Oliver, cello, performing two important works by Ludwig van Beethoven--Piano Concerto No. 3 and Symphony No. 5--as well as Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli's Christmas Concerto.
Born and raised in Southern California by Ecuadorian immigrant parents who were classical music lovers, Salcedo Rice was surrounded by the music that would become her passion and her life from an early age. She started piano lessons in the first grade and violin lessons the year after, studying for eight years with Claire Hodgkins, student of and assistant to Jascha Heifetz. Salcedo Rice says of her early years, "I was surrounded by such excellence that my passion as a music teacher has been to take that excellence I was given and provide it to my students in Ukiah. I also wanted to provide that quality to my girls," all three of whom were introduced to the violin at the age of two, and are now accomplished musicians of their own. (Rice's second daughter, Elizabeth Rice Oliver, has since switched to cello.)
After meeting her husband, Geoffrey Rice, on a blind date in Loma Linda, the pair relocated to Ukiah where Rice began an ophthalmology practice. Ten days after joining the Ukiah Symphony, in September of 1985, the couple's first daughter was born. "I just showed up and I never stopped. The community here embraced us," Salcedo Rice comments. She soon became the group's concertmistress--tuning and preparing the string section, performing sectional rehearsals, and playing solos. She also performs and sings Christian contemporary music with her three sisters, all of whom are Seventh Day Adventists, directs the Ukiah Junior Academy's choir, and teaches private students. As if that weren't enough, she is currently making her way through law school, appreciating how legal studies and music "span the left and right sides of the brain."
The ever-diligent Salcedo Rice is also studying up on Beethoven, whose varied and magnificent compositions she has played for many years and which she now is preparing to direct. Asking herself, "What kind of story is Beethoven trying to tell?" she muses, ""It's good to understand what a composer is trying to say. We take away from the music our own personal story, which we interpret according to our own life experience."
That interpretation and the passion to express it will be ably matched by piano virtuoso Elena Casanova, a featured player in the orchestra's performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3. Casanova was born and raised in Cuba where she attended a classical music academy and imbibed the island's rich and varied musical traditions, a blend of native, African, and European influences. Casanova herself ranges freely between jazz, traditional Cuban, and European classical music, calling her ever-evolving synthesis "Mendonesian or Mendo-Cuban." She is currently recording another album of classical Cuban music, in addition to coordinating several concert series, giving private lessons, and raising two teenagers. Now relocated to Fairfield, Casanova still maintains close ties to the people and culture of Mendocino County. She echoes Salcedo Rice's descriptions of receiving a warm welcome by Les Pfutzenreuter, the Ukiah Symphony's longtime conductor, as well as by the Symphony members themselves and the entire community, describing how, after completing a dramatic climax to the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3, the audience jumped up and gave her a standing ovation, leaving her to wonder if they knew there were two movements left.
Now Casanova is returning to replay that same concerto, under the direction of her good friend and collaborator Salcedo Rice. It was composed by Beethoven in the year 1800 and performed, with Beethoven himself on piano, in 1803. Loosely based on an earlier composition by Mozart, it is a departure in many ways, featuring an elaborate interplay between the piano and various instruments of the orchestra. The vigorous and sometimes agitated rhythms of the first movement give way to the slow, poignant piano chords of the second, with the third movement seeming to achieve a synthesis between the two with its sprightly pace and assured wit. "This concerto is very unique in the conversation that happens between the piano and the orchestra," Casanova comments. "Beethoven took the concerto form to a totally different level, I think. He made the solo piano shine above the orchestra," creating a composition "so much more exciting and less repetitious" than what had come before.
The resounding four chords that begin Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 were first heard in a Vienna concert hall in December 1808. Its audience had no clue they were listening to perhaps the most famous, and defining, classical composition of all time.
Although Beethoven achieved a large amount of success and wealth in his own lifetime, he also underwent his share of struggle. The hearing loss that would eventually render him completely deaf--an ironic fate for any musician, and one that would have crushed a lesser soul--was reconceptualized by him as an opportunity to "seize Fate by the throat; it shall not bend or crush me completely." This sense of being a lone and unique individual who, when pitted against the elements of an often indifferent fate, must rally all his resources in order to triumph, is a perfect expression of the Romantic movement that Beethoven's influence helped found and which would soon transform the landscape of European and American art and culture.
Margie Rice Conducts! plays Saturday, Dec. 2nd, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, Dec. 3rd, at 3 p.m. Tickets are $25 for ages 18 to 64; $20 for seniors age 65 and up; and free for ASB card holders, everyone under 18, and anyone who has been displaced by the October fires. Tickets are available at www.ukiahsymphony.org; Mendocino Book Company at 102 S. School St. in Ukiah; and Mail Center, Etc. at 207A N. Cloverdale Blvd. in Cloverdale. The concert takes place at the Mendocino College Center Theatre in Ukiah, with free parking and handicapped access. For further information please call the Ukiah Symphony hotline at 707 462-0236.
Concert-goers will be invited to make nontaxable cash or check donations to the Redwood Credit Union's Community Fund to aid those who lost loved ones, homes, or businesses to the recent fires in our community.
Margie Rice Conducts! is sponsored by Conrad & Joan Cox, Dr. Herschel & Susan Gordon, Charles & Wanda Mannon, and Realty World/Selzer Realty.
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Note: Ukiah Symphony's ticket policy is that tickets are non-refundable.
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LocationMendocino College Center Theatre (View)
1000 Hensley Creek Rd
Ukiah, CA 95482
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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