The Davis Summer Symphony, consisting of students, faculty and community members in the Davis and Sacramento area, completes its fifth year of operations this year and will be performing today at noon in the Grand Lobby of the Mondavi Center. The performance is this quarter’s first Free Noon Concert Series presented by the UC Davis Department of Music.
The program will include Tim Follin’s “Akrillic,” arranged by senior music and psychology double major Paul Watkins, Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor (opus 54, 1st Movement) and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 in Bb.
These three pieces were chosen to “appeal to audience members and the players,” said graduate student and Davis Summer Symphony conductor David Moschler.
Moschler, who is in his second year of Davis Summer Symphony, will earn his Masters of Art in conducting this fall. “[We] want to play music that’s exciting to them and that the group is able to do,“ he said.
“Akrillic,” originally from the 1993 Nintendo game Plok, was arranged and transcribed Watkins, who is a regular participant in the UC Davis Big Band, the Jazz Improv Combo and the Multimedia Ensemble.
“My arrangement came about as a result of an assignment in my orchestration class,” Watkins said. “I wanted to use video game music, having grown up around Nintendo consoles all my life and developing a deep connection to the in-game music.“
Watkins said he selected music from the game Plok because it both contains some of his favorite video game music. “Because it is relatively unknown … I wanted to bring it to a wider audience.“
Today’s concert will be the premiere performance of the Davis Summer Symphony’s rendition of “Akrillic.“
Moschler selected music from the classical, romantic and contemporary time periods to form an interesting and diverse program.
The symphony’s performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor will feature piano soloist ChiaWei Lin, a graduate student studying history of music and musicology.
In the Schumann piece, “there are a lot of conversations between the symphony and piano,” Lin said. “The melody will be more interesting because the orchestra is more pure and innocent and my timbre is more feminine. It will create a very unique tone.“
“We’re there to provide orchestral music for the people in the community … which they don’t normally have,” Moschler said.
SIMONE WAHNG can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.
