American music launches GTMF’s 65th season – JH News&Guide
Conductor Donato Cabrera fondly recalls listening to his grandmother play the piano while he was growing up in Reno, Nevada.
“She was someone who always gathered the family after dinner and played old Mexican waltzes that her father had taught her,” he said. “That idea, that music could bring people together, it inspired me to want to learn to play piano when I was around 7.”
This week, hundreds will gather for three free outdoor concerts on the lawn of the Center for the Arts, the opening strands of the Grand Teton Music Festival’s 65th season. Cabrera will conduct the Festival Orchestra in Thursday’s “From the Stage to the Silver Screen” program and in Saturday’s “Patriotic Pops” Fourth of July spectacle (see page 7). On Friday, Timothy Constable, the festival’s assistant conductor this year, will lead the “Family Jam.”
After that, it’s music from some of North America’s finest orchestra players seven days a week through Aug.15: four Wednesday night house concerts, five Thursday evening chamber music programs, five Friday and Saturday nights featuring the orchestra (led for the 20th season by music director Sir Donald Runnicles), three “Gateway” concerts starring celebrity ensembles, and scores of free musical gatherings to be held throughout Jackson Hole and Teton Valley.
The music starts this week, when GTMF invites the greater Teton community to join it on the lawn at the Center for the Arts. Cabrera — who comes to the Tetons from the California Symphony, is based in Walnut Creek near San Francisco, where he has been music and artistic director for more than a decade. He also served as resident conductor at the San Francisco Opera during Runnicles’ long tenure there as music director. Cabrera opens the six-week shebang Thursday with “From the Stage to the Silver Screen,” sampling favorite themes from Broadway and Hollywood.
“It’s a little bit of music that has changed all our lives,” Cabrera said, like selections from Leonard Bernstein’s score for “On the Town,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel,” Bernard Hermann’s soundtracks for “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest,” and of course themes by today’s most famous film composer, John Williams.
read the full story