The Los Angeles Philharmonic Presents The Oberlin Conservatory January 24, 2009

The Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the school The New York Times has called “a hotbed of contemporary-classical players,” presents the world premiere of Hanging Cliffs by award-winning and critically acclaimed composer Huang Ruo, an Oberlin alumnus and 2008 winner of the prestigious International Composition Prize sponsored by the Luxembourg Society for Contemporary Music. The concert is the final stop on Oberlin’s inaugural West Coast tour and features an ambitious program by the Oberlin Conservatory Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bridget-Michaele Reischl, that includes Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58, with Oberlin Associate Professor of Piano Angela Cheng as soloist, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major. The LA Phil presents the concert on its “Sounds About Town” series Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, January 24, at 2 p.m.

“Vision, imagination, sound, and music are always closely connected,” writes Huang Ruo in his program note for Hanging Cliffs. “The question is how to transform the visual into music? Imagine the entire stage as a huge canvas, and the various soundscapes created by the orchestra as abstract images floating in a surreal dreamscape. At the beginning of the piece, the orchestra plays in an upper register to create a ‘hanging’ gesture. Then, all of the hanging sounds descend from that upper range to illustrate various cliffs. From that point on, the journey to this imaginary dreamland takes flight … “

Official Website: http://www.oberlin.edu/westcoast