The Civic Orchestra of Tucson has been gathering to play classical music since the spring of 1975, when a man named George Schwartz decided he wanted a group to play with and invited his friends. Fifty-one seasons later, that impulse — musicians making music together, for anyone who wants to listen — is still the whole point. On Saturday, Oct. 24, the orchestra opens its 51st season at 3 p.m. at Mountain View High School, 3901 W. Linda Vista Blvd. in Marana, with a program it's calling "Masterworks Triumvirate." Admission is free, general admission, no ticket required.
The program is three pieces by three composers from three different worlds, and the thread that ties them together is speed. All three were written in a hurry — one in three days, one in about ten weeks, one in a matter of weeks at the very end of a short life. All three, unusually, are joyful.
Start with the fastest. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Festive Overture, Op. 96, in 1954 for the Bolshoi Theatre's celebration of the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution. The story, as recounted by those close to him, is a comedy of deadline panic: Vassili Nebolsin, a conductor at the Bolshoi, turned up unannounced at Shostakovich's apartment because the theatre urgently needed a celebratory piece and had almost no time to get one. Shostakovich agreed and started writing on the spot. Within an hour, couriers were being dispatched to his flat to collect the score page by page as he finished it, ferrying each sheet to the Bolshoi's copyists so the parts could be prepared in time for the premiere on Nov. 6. The result opens with a brass fanfare that sounds like a curtain going up and never really stops grinning.
Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88, took longer — roughly two and a half months, from Aug. 26 to Nov. 8, 1889 — but it was still a fast, fluent piece of work, composed and orchestrated at his country retreat at Vysoká u Příbramě in Bohemia. He wrote it on the occasion of his election to the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and Arts, and he conducted the premiere himself in Prague on Feb. 2, 1890, with the orchestra of the National Theatre. It was originally published as his Symphony No. 4, which tells you something about how the numbering of Dvořák symphonies has shifted over the years. What matters more is the mood: the Eighth is the sunny one, steeped in Bohemian folk tunes, cheerful and optimistic in a way that surprised listeners who knew the dark, dramatic Seventh he had written six years earlier.
Then there is Mozart. The Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622, was completed in October 1791, a few weeks before the composer died on Dec. 5 at the age of 35. It was written for his friend Anton Stadler, a clarinettist, and composed for an instrument most of us will never hear live: the basset clarinet, which reaches lower than a standard clarinet. The manuscript is lost, and after Mozart's death the concerto was published with the solo part altered so it could be played on ordinary clarinets — which is how nearly everyone plays it now. The date of the first performance isn't certain, but it may have been Oct. 16, 1791, in Prague. It was Mozart's second-to-last completed work, coming just before the cantata "Laut verkünde unsre Freude," and it has been called his swan song. Even its slow movement, an Adagio in D major, is suffused with light rather than grief.
Taking on the solo part is Philip Evans, the orchestra's principal clarinet, who came to Tucson after a 30-year career in Southern California that included performing with a half-dozen leading orchestras, among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the L.A. Mozart Orchestra.
On the podium is Dr. Keun Oh, who is only the fourth music director in the orchestra's history. A graduate of the University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music, where he earned his doctorate in conducting, Oh took over in 2022 after Charles Bontrager retired. The line of succession is a story in itself: Schwartz led the group from its founding until 1980, when Herschel Kreloff took the baton. Kreloff held it for 37 years, until 2017, when Bontrager succeeded him; Kreloff died in April 2018. Oh was named Bontrager's replacement the following spring and introduced himself to audiences at the start of the 47th season in October 2022, leading Brahms' First Symphony.
The orchestra is a volunteer ensemble of about 75 players, and it has kept to its founding bargain: free concerts, played in the places where people actually live. Under Oh it performs four free concert cycles a year across Tucson, Marana, Oro Valley, Sahuarita and Green Valley — high school auditoriums and community halls rather than a downtown concert hall with a box office. The season opener is played twice: 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 24, at Mountain View High School in Marana, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25, at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive in Tucson.
There is something fitting about a program built on three composers writing at speed being played by a community orchestra, where the people on stage have day jobs and rehearse in the evenings. Shostakovich's couriers, Dvořák's summer at Vysoká, Mozart's last autumn in Vienna — none of it was written for a gala. It was written to be played, and on a Saturday afternoon in Marana it will be, for free, to anyone who walks in.