Dancers, Aerialists, Fire Spinners to Join TSO Performance at All Souls Finale
(Tucson, AZ)─The Tucson Symphony Orchestra will participate in All Souls Procession Weekend with two special performances. Music Director Jose Luis Gomez will conduct the TSO and Mariachi Los Camperos in Dia de Los Muertos to launch the weekend with a very special one-night-only performance Friday, November 3 at 7:30 p.m. at Tucson Music Hall. Maestro Gomez will also conduct the TSO at the free All Souls Day Finale Ceremony Sunday, November 5 at 7:45 p.m. at the Finale Site at the Mercado San Agustin.
“I know the enormous impact All Souls Day has in Tucson and I couldn’t wait for the TSO to be part of it,” said Maestro Gomez. “It is a fantastic and wonderful way to connect emotionally through music with the vast, diverse and broad community that Tucson is.”
The Tucson Symphony and Mariachi Los Camperos will raise spirits and celebrate life with a program featuring impressive vocals, violins and guitars steeped in rich cultural tradition. Dia de Los Muertos will feature songs inspired by the lives and spirits of real people such as the first female Mexican musician to become a successful composer, Maria Grever, to folk legends like “La Llorona,” (The Crying Woman). The song tells the story of a legendary ghost prominent in folklore of Spanish America. According to the tradition, La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who lost her children and now cries while looking for them in the river, often causing misfortune to those who are near or hear her.
Founded in 1960 by mariachi “giant” Natividad “Nati” Cano, the 11-member Mariachi Los Camperos includes musicians from both Mexico and the U.S. They collaborated with Linda Ronstadt on her 1987 double platinum album, Canciones de Mi Padre (Songs of my Father). The Grammy-nominated ensemble has recorded nine albums including four CDs with Smithsonian Folkways.
Tickets to Mariachi Los Camperos with the Tucson Symphony are $30 to $78. They are available online at www.tucsonsymphony.org, at the Tucson Symphony Orchestra Box Office, 2175 N. Sixth Avenue or by phone at 520.882.8585. TSO Box Office hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. unless otherwise indicated.
All Souls Procession Finale is Free Concert for Community
The All Souls Day Procession, celebrating and mourning the lives of loved ones and ancestors, is one of the most important, inclusive and authentic public ceremonies in North America today. Well over 150,000 participants on the streets of downtown Tucson join together for a two-mile long human-powered procession that ends in the ceremonial burning of a large Urn filled with the hopes, offerings and wishes of the public for those who have passed.
The theme of this year’s Finale Ceremony is “The Marriage of the Sun and Moon,” an homage to the roots of Western classical thought, drawing on the artistry of Medieval and Renaissance alchemical and hermetic texts. The 45-minute TSO program will include music from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (inspired by a witches’ Sabbath), Ave Maria performed by soprano Samantha Farmilant and Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, based on the French superstition that “Death” appears at midnight every Halloween and calls forth the dead to dance for him until dawn. The program will conclude with Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. The TSO will be joined by dancers, aerialists, fire spinners, and other performers to carry out the theme of “The Marriage of the Sun and Moon.”
Programming, artists and prices are subject to change.
Contact: Terry Marshall, Public Relations Manager, 520.620.9158
