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Review: The 10th annual event features music from the 30s and 40s, and the world premiere of a new work by Michael Daugherty. See slide show of the Pacific Symphony’s “Greatest Generation” concert
The Pacific Symphony’s 10th annual American Composers Festival, as in year’s past, is dedicated to a single overriding theme. This time it’s “The Greatest Generation.” “Hard times can produce great art,” writes music historian Joseph Horowitz in the program booklet. The festival will explore music, he continues, “that could not have been composed without the somber impetus of the Great Depression and World War II.”
Thursday night’s festival concert in Segerstrom Concert Hall was patriotic, moving, earnest, interesting, distracting, entertaining, sentimental, original. With these ACF concerts, as well as with its “Music Unwound” events, the orchestra wants to break down the fourth wall between the audience and the art and to give listeners explicit context for engagement – you know, to help them along a little. Surveys taken by the orchestra are showing that audiences like the approach, and Thursday’s certainly seemed to.
The concert began with the national anthem, and then Tom Brokaw – the man credited with coining the term “The Greatest Generation” – came on the big screen, interviewed last week in New York especially for this occasion. It was a nice touch and set the stage. In talking about the people who lived through those times, he mentioned his mother, a denizen of Laguna Woods, still “thrifty” after all these years and still quizzing her son about the cost of his purchases at Trader Joe’s.
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