Palo Alto Philharmonic kicks off 10th year on Saturday

First concert of season will feature 11-year-old Paladio Garcia playing Mendelssohn

by Alison Davis

The Palo Alto Philharmonic will commemorate its 10-year anniversary this weekend with a featured soloist barely older than the group itself.

At its season opener Saturday, Oct. 18, violinist and child prodigy Paladio Garcia, 11, will perform Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, a rarely performed, treacherously challenging piece.

"Only three artists have ever made a recording (of this piece)," said Roy Louie, the Philharmonic's acting president, who plays first violin.

After a recent rehearsal with Garcia, Gideon Grau, the group's conductor and music director, described the young musician as having lots of energy and an extraordinary talent for playing the violin.

Garcia, who lives with her parents in Berkeley, asked for violin lessons at the age of four after seeing a group of kids playing violins on an episode of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." Her performance with the Palo Alto Philharmonic marks her debut as a symphony soloist.

Also featured that evening at Cubberley Theater will be local cellist Malkhaz Dediashvili. A native of Tbilisi, Georgia, in the former Soviet Union, Dediashvili will play the Elegie for Cello and Orchestra by Faure.

The rest of the evening's program includes works by Rossini, Khachaturian and Delibes.

Other highlights of the '97-'98 season include an all-Beethoven gala on Dec. 6, also at Cubberley Theater. At that concert, the Philharmonic will play the famous, but rarely performed, fifth symphony by Beethoven on the occasion of the 190th anniversary of that work. Well-known local violinist Karen Bentley will be the featured soloist that evening, performing the composer's Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano.

Also planned for the coming year are an all-opera program, a special performance for the winner of the Palo Alto Philharmonic's Solo Competition, a young people's concert, and two concerts featuring chamber music.

In the decade since the group has been in existence, the Palo Alto Philharmonic has garnered a reputation as a small-town orchestra with a big-city sound. The majority of the Philharmonic's all-volunteer performers hail from Palo Alto and the immediate vicinity, making it the city's only truly local symphony, says Louie, a retired city of Palo Alto employee.

Among the current roughly 50 members of the ensemble are a preponderance of physicists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, an employee of Stanford Research Institute, an international marketing manager for a biotech company, as well as several "semi-paid" musicians from the San Jose and San Francisco symphonies.

The abundance of technical types in the group isn't at all surprising to Ann Jona of Redwood City, a native of Hungary and a member of the group's board of directors.

"It's quite interesting," she said, "In Europe, there are a lot of doctors and mathematicians who play chamber music."

What: The Palo Alto Philharmonic in concert

When: Saturday, Oct. 18, at 8 p.m.; subsequent performances will be on Dec. 6, Jan. 31 (chamber music), March 15, May 9, June 6 (chamber music), and June 13

Where: Oct. 18 show is at Cubberley Community Theater, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto; call for locations of subsequent shows.

How much: Tickets are $6 to $10

Information: Call Jane at 325-1997 or Dorothy at 857-1691

Back up to the Table of Contents Page