A Message from Carl St.Clair

Welcome to what will surely be another exciting Pacific Symphony season at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, a true acoustic gem we are proud to call our home. Once again, we are deeply indebted to the Hal and Jeanette Segerstrom Family for their extraordinary support of the Classical series. Through their tremendous philanthropic commitment, the orchestra has been able to perform the greatest masterworks, engage leading artists, and commission new American works. They are the first family of classical music in Orange County, and the musicians, Board, and I are truly grateful to them.

For our special pre-season concert, we welcome back our dear friend Lang Lang. He is a brilliant artist, and he performs Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No 2 on an all-French program that features music of Satie and Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition. For this concert we will be projecting on the large screen above the orchestra stunning new visuals for Mussorgsky’s virtuoso showpiece in a unique collaboration with our gifted colleagues at Orange County Museum of Art.

With the 2022-23 season, Pacific Symphony is entering a new era of discovery, exploring new musical experiences to share with our audiences. We look forward to introducing you to exciting new voices and music from around the world. Opening night will present a work by Viet Cuong, our new composer-in-residence. I could also call him an artist-in-residence because he will be contributing to our musical lives in so many ways. And, as a Vietnamese American, he will help us to engage in new cultural conversations with Orange County’s Vietnamese community, the largest in the world outside of Vietnam itself.

Complementing our incredibly exciting season, we’ve created many new and exhilarating musical encounters for you to experience. We are pleased to share with you the music of women composers from around the world: Mexico’s Gabriela Ortiz, the United Kingdom’s Anna Clyne, and Brazil’s Clarice Assad. The international surprises continue all season long, including guitarist Miloš from Montenegro, who will perform the work that could be considered Spain’s greatest export, Rodrigo’s famous Concierto de Aranjuez. We’ll have an exciting piece from the Polish film composer Wojciech Kilar and even music from 1920s France.

I think of this season as a multicultural mosaic of music, and I know you will enjoy it.

Carl St.Clair
Music Director