Election Section

Two of the area’s orchestras, the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the Berkeley Symphony, will go into high gear unusually early this season. Regional orchestras, as a rule, start up a few weeks after the beginning of the season in San Francisco and nationally, but it’s different this time. 

Kent Nagano will conduct the Berkeley Symphony’s season-opening concert Monday night at 8 p.m. in Zellerbach Hall. The program will be even more contemporary and challenging than Berkeley audiences have come to expect from Nagano in the past quarter century of his pioneering music-making. Even a tried-and-true item on the program, a J.S. Bach chorale prelude, called “Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, heiliger Geist,” will be performed in Arnold “12-tone” Schoenberg’s orchestration. Sophisticated Berkeley audiences know that just because Schoenberg produced some difficult works late in life, as an orchestrator he is nothing to fear. The other mainstream item is Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. Students can buy tickets the night of the concert for $10. 

The rest of the program is new, in a hot-and-heavy way: George Benjamin, one of the new British wunderkind composers, is represented by “Viola Viola,” a concerto for two violists and orchestra, with two brilliant local musicians—Ellen Ruth Rose and Kurt Rohde—playing the solos. And then, the U.S. premiere of Korean-American composer Unsuk Chin’s Violin Concerto, with Viviane Hagner. See www.berkeleysymphony.org.  

Michael Morgan’s Oakland East Bay Symphony will not begin the official season until Nov. 19, but this Sunday, Sept. 12, it will play at a 9/11 memorial “Concert of Peace,” beginning at 4 p.m. in Berkeley’s St. Joseph the Worker Church, 1640 Addison St. 

Pianist William Corbett-Jones, the orchestra, and the Peace Chorus will perform music by Handel and Gordon Getty, who will attend the concert, and the world premiere of John W. Vitz’ “Mass for Peace in the Third Millennium.”  

Donations for the church are suggested at $30 for general admission and $15 for students and seniors. For information, call 843-2244, but be sure first to turn off your phone’s privacy block by dialing *82. This is the first time I came up against this, and thought I'd save you the time and trouble. Apparently, *82 turns off protection only for one number at a time, so your privacy will be protected automatically thereafter. 

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