‘Rhythmic Heat’ opens our 13th season Oct. 22

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We open our 13th season Oct. 22 with a concert that rocks. You’ll feel the beat at “Rhythmic Heat.” Maestro Peter Jaffe has brought together three compositions that highlight vigorous tempos and lively, offbeat sounds. Pianist Natsuki Fukasawa solos.As always during our regular season, we will perform at the Harris Center. Concert time is 7:30 p.m.

The evening opens with Mexican composer Arturo Marquez’s Danzon No. 2, one of the most  frequently  performed classical Mexican pieces. The tune is so popular it has been called Mexico’s  second national  anthem. Inspired by his country’s Latin ballroom dances as well as music from  Cuba, Marquez created  the lively — sometimes wild — rhythms through varying accents and  tempos. The composition  premiered in Mexico City in 1994. Marquez earned an MFA on a Fulbright  Scholarship from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

Maurice Ravel wrote many stunning pieces besides the well-known “Bolero,” and the orchestra, with guest soloist Fukasawa, will perform one of them at this concert. His Piano Concerto in G major is heavily infused with sounds of jazz, which the composer encountered — and loved — on a U.S. concert tour in 1928. The piece premiered on April 22, 1932, with simultaneous performances in Boston and Philadelphia. The rhythmic sounds are effected with a gong, wood block and whip as well as the classical orchestral instruments.

A Northern Californian, Fukasawa is returning for her third appearance with the symphony. She has performed around the world as both piano soloist and chamber musician. Recently, she completed a tour of Italy and traveled to Ukraine and Hong Kong. Her playing is on the sound track for the recently released film “We Had to Go — Remembering Internment.” Fukusawa is on the artist faculty of the Orfeo Music Festival in the Italian Alps, the Talis Festival and Academy in Switzerland and the Calcap Chamber Music Workshop in Sacramento. She coaches for the California Capital Chamber Music Workshop and teaches in Sacramento at her private studio.

Probably everyone is familiar with at least some of the sounds from our third selection, Leonard Bernstein’s iconic “West Side Story,” the popular Broadway musical from the late 1950s and 1960s. The composer selected dance numbers from the production and reworked them into a separate concert piece, Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story.” If you’ve seen the play, strains of your favorite tunes will recall the doomed love story of Tony and Maria, from rival New York gangs (the script was inspired by Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”). The music for the play came to him, Bernstein wrote, after hearing the “rhythms and pulses” of Tin Pan Alley tunes, jazz and Latin music. All of these sounds are evident in this classical work.

Along with the symphony’s website, www.folsomlakesymphony.com, tickets can be purchased by calling 916-608-6888 or visiting the Harris Center ticket office on the Folsom Lake College campus at 10 College Parkway, Folsom.

For more information on the Folsom Lake Symphony, call 916-357-6718 or email info@folsomlakesymphony.com.

The Folsom Lake Symphony is the resident orchestra at the Harris Center for the Performing Arts.