Diablo Symphony Concert "West Side Story" and more

Name: Diablo Symphony Concert "West Side Story" and more
Start: 2024-05-19T19:30:00-07:00
End: 2024-05-19T21:00:00-07:00
Location: Lesher Center for the Arts

Schedule

Sun May 19 2024 at 07:30 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Lesher Center for the Arts | Walnut Creek, CA

The DSO's final concert of the season brings New York City to the Lesher Center for the Arts on May 19 at 7:30 p.m., with Leonard Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story," and the first three movements (“I’m Late, I’m Late,” “Her,” and “Pan”) of Eddie Sauter's "Focus Suite," featuring the DSO's own Greg Brown on tenor saxophone. Composed in 1961, "Focus Suite" combines a string orchestra, piano, harp, and rhythm section with the saxophone in a work that has been described as a "meeting point between jazz and classical music." Brown, who retired in 2021 as chairman of the music department at Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, received the Paul A. Shaghoian Jazz Educator Award honoring excellence in jazz education from the California Music Educators Association in 2019. Additionally, the school’s jazz band won first place in the high school big band division at the Next Generation Jazz Festival, sponsored by the Monterey Jazz Festival, for five consecutive years during Brown’s tenure and performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival six times between 2014 and 2019. He has also been codirector and educational consultant for the Big Band of Rossmoor since 2014.