San Diego Symphony set to shine at its California festival concerts at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park

An acclaimed composer and buzz-making saxophonist will place a neglected instrument in the spotlight.

Treasured classical-music gems will mingle with freshly minted works.

“Diaspora: Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, a composition that traces the African-to-America journey, will be featured with “A Casual Walk to Extinction,” a world premiere that aurally explores the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

All these things are set to happen in one night when the San Diego Symphony opens its Jacobs Masterworks season on Saturday at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park. Originally, the concert was to be performed at Jacobs Music Center but a delay in ongoing renovations saw its scheduled reopening pushed back from this fall until 2024.

“Diaspora” is by composer Billy Childs, a Grammy Award-winning pianist who is equally adept at writing jazz, classical and chamber music. He received a request from Steven Banks a few years ago to compose a saxophone concerto for him.

“I watched videos of Steven playing sax,” said Childs from his home in Los Angeles. “He is in the top echelon as a classical saxophonist. It’s unreal what he can do!

“I’ve written extensively for sax in jazz but not in European classical music. Its inventor, Adolphe Sax, intended it to be played in orchestras. it faded into obscurity in Europe. But it came to America and turned into the voice of jazz. I’ve loved the sound of sax in any genre. I knew exactly how the concerto was going to sound, so I was on board.”

Childs explores the Black experience from before the slave trade in Africa to present-day America. He utilized three writers as “architectural signposts:” Nayyirah Waheed, Claude McKay and Maya Angelou.

“Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’ inspired the last part,” Childs explained. “It honors Black resilience and is dedicated to my mother.”

The San Diego Symphony was one of nine orchestras that co-commissioned “Diaspora.” By coincidence, Rafael Payare, the symphony’s music director, had worked with saxophonist Banks last year in Montreal.

“We knew this performance was going to happen, so we already could look forward to working together again.” recalled Payare, who is also the music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

Two days before Saturday’s concert at The Shell, the orchestra will perform in Mexico in the annual Día de los Muertos celebration at the Tijuana Cultural Center.

The Shell program will include two pieces from David Chesky’s “The Abreu Danza” ballet, which is dedicated to Venezuelan educator José Antonio Abreu. Abreu founded El Sistema, the music-education program that fellow Venezuelan Payare came up in.

San Diego Symphony music director Rafael Payare.

California Festival kickoff

Saturday’s concert is a part of the inaugural edition of the California Festival: A Celebration of New Music, which Payare co-founded with Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel and San Francisco Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is a statewide initiative designed to showcase emerging composers.

The festival, opening Tuesday and continuing through Nov. 19, will feature concerts at more than 80 California venues from Fort Bragg in Northern California to several locations in San Diego. During the festival’s 16-day run, 33 new compositions will make their world premiere, along with 188 pieces composed in the past five years. The oldest composer whose new work will be featured in the festival is 97-year-old Betsy Jolas and the youngest composers are Kevin Day and Quinn Mason, who are both 27.

Besides the works on San Diego Symphony’s Saturday program by Childs and Chesky,the concert will close with Strauss’ 1896 tone poem “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

“The idea of the festival was to bring music from the last five years, but also music that represents something new,” Payare explained. “Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ is 100 years old but still sounds like a groundbreaking piece.”

Spanish composer Juan Jose Colomer stands in a concert hall.

Making Saturday night even more special will be a world premiere work by Spanish composer Juan Jose Colomer titled “A Casual Walk to Extinction.” Payare approached Colomer about writing a piece in time for the festival, but the Spanish composer had already written “Walk.”

“It is fantastic,” Payare said. “JuanJo said it hadn’t been premiered and he wanted us to do it. So, it worked out for everybody very easily. Everything was aligned.”

Free family fun day

San Diego Symphony concludes its season-opening weekend next Sunday with the free California Festival Family & Community Day at The Shell.

Rafael Payare, the symphony’s music director, credits Laura Reynolds — the symphony’s vice president of impact and innovation — for assembling such a vibrant variety of artists. The repertoire will be a lively mix of beloved classic works and recent pieces written within the past five years.

The orchestra will launch the afternoon’s festivities with a program highlighting pieces by living composers Carlos Simon and Jessie Montgomery, along with Mozart’s “Kindersymphonie” (“Toy Symphony”) and Prokofiev’s much-loved “Peter and the Wolf.” San Diego Suzuki School of Music students will be featured.

People picnic at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park in San Diego.

The San Diego Youth Symphony, led by Sameer Patel, will bookend three new works with Brahams’ Hungarian Dances. The San Diego Master Chorale, conducted by John Russell, will perform a variety of pieces, concluding with arrangements of “True Colors” and “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

The local chamber-music ensemble Art of Elan will perform works by some of today’s top contemporary composers, including Juhi Bansal, Paul Wiancko, Carlos Simon and Nahre Sol. Sol’s piece, “Crossroads,” is a world premiere.

Food, beverages (no alcohol), chairs and blankets can be brought into the venue for this concert. Food and drink will also be available for purchase onsite.