DOWNEY - “It’s filled with sizzle and sparkle,” said Sharon Lavery, Music Director for the Downey Symphonic Society. “What better way to open a program than Bernstein’s Overture to Candide! A perfect piece to get the evening started.”

But even before the Downey Symphonic Orchestra plays the official Overture, Dottie Nadolski will begin the evening by conducting “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker song arranged exclusively for the Orchestra by Luca Mendoza. April 9 is the night the winner of the last baton auction, in 2019, will give the down beat to start the Downey Symphony Orchestra’s long-awaited spring subscription concert.

“After the intermission the auction for the April 2023 baton will be conducted,” said Anthony Crespo, president of the Downey Symphonic Society. “This is everyone’s chance to bid for that once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

Twenty-five years ago the winning bid was $400. Now it has risen to a jaw-dropping $3,500.

“Next, as I always try to do,” said Music Director Sharon, of the Orchestra’s upcoming concert at the Downey Theatre, “I included a work that is very new, Open World, the highlights from Pinar Toprak’s score from the blockbuster movie, Captain Marvel.”

“I had worked with Pinar on another concert,” said Sharon, “and I always wanted the opportunity to program her music because she is a very talented composer, so here was my chance. I was also very proud that Captain Marvel was the highest grossing film scored by a female composer in history.”

Pinar Toprak is a Turkish-American composer for film, television and video games. Born and raised in Istanbul, she earned a master's degree at California State University, Northridge, in composition.

Growing up, Tovar says that music and books gave her an escape to another world that was not her world at all.

“Sometimes a really cool song goes a long way in telling the story," Pinar has said of her score, a fusion of electronic and orchestral sounds, with the electronic parts representing the aliens and the orchestra representing the main character.

To cap the first half, the Symphonic Society presents Bach’s Well-Tempered Marimba. If the marimba had existed 300 years ago, in Johann Sebastian Bach's time, would he have composed for that dark, mellow, resonant instrument? Why not? The marimba has a range of five octaves, the same as the harpsichord, and the chromatic bars are placed in order just like a harpsichord keyboard.

Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, first performed exactly 300 years ago in 1722, translates well from an 18th century string keyboard instrument, to the marimba, brought to the New World with the slave trade from Africa. Its wooden bars resonate when they are struck with rubber mallets, like the harpsicord’s strings that are plucked.

“As soon as I heard David and Soojin play this Bach arrangement for two marimbas,” said Music Director Sharon, “I knew immediately that I wanted to engage them for our upcoming program with the Downey Symphony Orchestra. They did a wonderful job making this arrangement for two marimbas, and an equally impressive job performing it. Two marvelous percussionists.”

This won't be the first time the Downey Symphony Orchestra has featured marimbas. Back in the 1990's when the Downey Symphonic Society started doing celebrity soloist concerts as fund raisers and I was on the Board, we invited Roger Williams. He absolutely charmed the audience, with his patter talk while playing the grand piano: Chopin, Falling Leaves, and a medley suggested by the audience that somehow produced the Notre Dame Fight Song.

Roger had two talented women playing marimbas to accompany him, plus our own symphony orchestra under Tom Osborn's baton. The sound was amazing, and the audience absolutely loved it, and wanted us to hire his marimba players for our orchestra. Here is a 2022 version of that success.

The biggest musical work of the night always comes in the second half of the evening. “Actually, the piece that came first of all in my planning,” said Sharon, “was the one with the largest orchestra: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, Bernstein’s masterpiece. I began programming around that. If you loved the music in the movie, here’s your chance to hear it again.”

As musical theatre, West Side Story is a blend of everything from jazz syncopations to Latin-American dance, all treated with classical techniques. There’s even mambo and cha cha in Rumble and Cool, as Shakespeare’s updated story of Romeo and Juliet draws to its tragic end.

Something to listen for: the dances, and the score of the musical, revolve around these notes: C, F sharp, G, the three tones of the well-known opening of the song Maria. As Bernstein later wrote: “The three notes pervade the whole piece, inverted, done backwards. I didn’t do all this on purpose. It seemed to come out in ‘Cool’ and as the gang whistle, in the Prologue. The same three notes.”

“But we won’t be using the Symphonic Dances as our program’s climax, for one simple reason,” said Sharon. “It ends very softly, and ending a concert this way would be extremely awkward. Because this is an important piece I knew it had to come on the second half, but I knew something emphatic was needed to follow it. I chose Ives, Variations on America, to follow the Suite because I knew it would be a fun and exciting way to end the concert, and it also beautifully ties the whole concert together.”

Optimistic, idealistic, fiercely democratic, Charles Ives is an American modernist composer and he forged a distinctly American music, for the growing American nation. Born in 1874 and a virtuoso organist, when people asked Ives what he played, he would reply, “shortstop.”

Ives’s Variations on America was premiered at a recital celebrating the Fourth of July and it uses variations on the tune My Country ‘Tis of Thee, the same one as the national anthem of the UK, “God Save the Queen. You can hear the town band in a holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, a set of close harmonies, a march, a polonaise, and a ragtime allegro.

The April 9 concert starts at 8 pm at the Downey Theatre. Tickets are available by visiting the Box Office, 8435 Firestone Blvd, Downey, by calling (562) 861-8211 or online at downeytheatre.org.