UC Davis Symphony Orchestra @ Mondavi Center

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The concert opens with Yu-Hui Chang’s Pixelandia, a 2015 multi-movement work inspired by the joy of first-wave 2D video games, “with graphics so primitive that every scan line and pixel was visible.” Music and video-game enthusiasts will be delighted to learn that the third movement is where one meet’s the “Boss” and that the tempo marking before the last movement is “Insert coin to continue.”

The other two pieces on the program are by 20th-century American composers Florence Price and Samuel Barber. Price’s music didn’t enjoy the same successes as Barber’s did “on account of [her] sex and race.” Her Third Symphony in C Minor was funded by a Works Progress Administration (WPA) grant and was first performed in 1940, Michigan. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was in attendance, but the work remained unperformed until 2001 when the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco recorded it. The work interweaves mid-century modernist music techniques with African dance rhythms and themes.

Barber’s Knoxville uses a poem by James Agee, sung by soprano and orchestra. The work is a musical picture of a summer’s day in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915, in which a boy lays in a field listening to the sounds around him. This performance features Guyanese American soprano Shawnette Sulker, acclaimed for her “heart-breaking poignancy” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Knoxville was last performed at the Mondavi Center by Christine Brewer and the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 4, 2009, for the Barbara K. Jackson Rising Stars of Opera.

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