Join the La Mirada Symphony on Sunday, November 24th for the first concert of their 2019/2020 season at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts. This free concert, entitled Celebrating The Great 5th Symphonies, will spend an afternoon with music from Rossini, Creston, and Tchaikovsky.
Gioacchino Rossini: Overture to Semiramide
Paul Creston: Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra
Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E Minor
The concert’s guest performer is Alto Saxophone player Harvey Pittel. Saxophone master Harvey Pittel will be performing! There are few saxophone masters in the modern world, and even fewer who compare to Harvey Pittel. For Pittel, the title “master” is an appropriately well-earned and well-deserved description. The critics of the United States agree.
The New York Times’ Raymond Ericson wrote, in regard to one of Pittel’s many New York concerts, that the music he heard was “An evening as stimulating musically as it was dazzling technically.”
Michael Steinberg of the Boston Globe wrote Pittel is “A superb musician and instrumentalist, with an elegant sense of phrase, vast technical resources, and beautiful firmly-centered tone.”
The San Francisco Chronicle pointed out how Pittel has reached the goal for which all us musicians strive, “The thing about Pittel is that he plays so well and so stylishly… The control and variety of timbre – along with a varied chest of instruments – allows him to adapt to whatever he plays.” And now the kicker, “One ends up hearing the music rather than the performer;” there just can’t be a loftier goal and one which Pittel achieves night after night after night.
Winthrop Sargeant in The New Yorker furthered all of those sentiments when he wrote, “(Pittel is) Clearly a master of his instrument.” The great critic Harold Schonberg, also of The New York Times, summed it up the same way, “(Pittel is) A master of his instrument.” As Stan Lee would say, “Nuff said.”
A pre-concert discussion will begin at 2:15 pm and the concert will begin at 3:00 pm. Click here to reserve your free tickets for Celebrating The Great 5th Symphonies.
Source: La Mirada Symphony