Music

One member of the noon-hour audience at last week’s San Diego Symphony concert who was listening with unusually rapt attention was composer Robert W. Jones, who was hearing his “Phoenician Fanfares” played for the first time.

Over the summer, Jones completed his programmatic piece that depicts the downfall and revival of the local orchestra. He offered it to the orchestra, and resident conductor Fabio Mechetti chose to perform it on the orchestra’s first appearance of the new season, the concert on the plaza at the downtown Bank of America building.

Jones, a retired college music teacher who lives in El Cajon, described himself as a composer by profession. While teaching in the Detroit area, he worked seven years on the Ford Foundation’s contemporary music program. He has written two symphonies and several concertos, and is finishing a work for the organ that is to be premiered at St. Paul’s Cathedral here on Feb. 7.

The composer said he was pleased by the orchestra’s performance. It was the first time a major symphony had performed one of his compositions. “I’ve always written for community orchestras in the past,” said Jones. “I felt my calling was writing for the semi-professional player.”

- Now that the San Diego Symphony is back in the news for reasons musical--as opposed to financial--some symphony patrons have asked what former music director David Atherton is doing these days. Last month, a review in The Times of London favorably recounted Atherton’s conducting of the BBC Symphony in a Festival Hall concert of the works of countrymen Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett.

Although Atherton was criticized in San Diego for programming hefty portions of contemporary British music, pairing Britten’s “Spring Symphony” and Tippett’s Fourth Symphony struck Times critic Geoffrey Norris as “a neat idea.”

Atherton appeared with vocal soloists Felicity Palmer and Philip Langridge, two singers he brought to this city during his tenure with the San Diego Symphony.

- Local opera buffs can hear a preview of mezzo soprano Dolora Zajic, who will be one of the soloists in San Diego Opera’s Verdi “Requiem” on March 9, 1988. Last week the British label E.M.I. released a new recording of the “Requiem” with Zajic singing the mezzo solos, surrounded by a rather respectable cast: tenor Luciano Pavarotti, bass Samuel Ramey, and conductor Riccardo Muti leading the La Scala orchestra and chorus. Zajic, a rising American singer, will make her San Diego Opera debut as Azucena in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” on Feb. 27.

- For UC San Diego composer Rand Steiger, the odds for a successful performance of his latest work, Double Concerto for Piano and Percussion, were double or nothing.

A piece commissioned two years ago by the Pasadena Chamber Orchestra, the chances for its survival registered zero when the Pasadena organization subsequently went bankrupt. Fortunately the commission was picked up by the Los Angeles Philharmonic--for which Steiger is now a composer fellow--and the piece was given its world premiere Nov. 9 in Los Angeles. The 30-year-old composer came up a double winner: audience response and critical approval of the work had Steiger beaming.

- Claudio Arrau, the eminent Chilean-born pianist who is to perform a solo recital in San Diego’s Civic Theatre on Dec. 2, was overwhelmed with a 25-minute ovation when he performed the Beethoven “Emperor” Concerto in Dresden last month. For the 84-year-old Arrau, this was his first performance in East Germany in more than 50 years. In Berlin in the mid-1930s, Arrau gave marathon concerts of the complete keyboard works of Bach and Mozart. Last month, Arrau’s public performance capped his recording of the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Dresden Staatskapelle for Philips Records.