Halloween "Psycho" Concert with the San Francisco Concerto Orchestra

Napa Valley College Music Department

The Bay area community is invited as the Performing Arts Center at Napa Valley College celebrates Halloween presenting the PSYCHO Concert by the San Francisco Concerto Orchestra. The orchestra, comprised by some of the finest professional musicians in the San Francisco Bay area, is making its debut in the inaugural orchestral concert in the new Main Theater at the Performing Arts Center. Featured soloists for the evening will be Annette DiMedio, pianist; Joseph Gold, violinist; Karen Bentley, violinist, and Seth Montfort, pianist. Roberto-Juan González, orchestra director at Napa Valley College since 1988, and Principal Conductor of the Concerto Orchestra, will conduct. The music featured on the evening’s concert includes works from the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries, designed to scare, titillate, and excite concert and film audiences. Concertos by Tartini, Liszt, and Saint-Saëns make up the music of the night. The concert takes its name from Bernard Herrmann’s music from the film “PSYCHO” to be played by the orchestra, across the street from the Napa Mental Hospital, which faces the new Performing Arts Center. The music begins at 8:00pm in the Main Theater at the PAC, on the northmost part of College Way, at Napa Valley College, 2277 Napa-Vallejo Highway, in Napa. Plenty of free parking and convenient access to the building and the hall. The concert is a benefit for the piano fund of the new Performing Arts Center. Reserved seats are ($15; $10 students, seniors, military) available are available by phone: (707)256-7500, online: http://www.musicnapavalley.org or at the box office, the night of the concert.

Annette DiMedio will be playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major. Ms. DiMedio, the Diva from Philly, was the first person in the Philadelphia Orchestra's history to win their pianist competition in all three age categories. She also won the Liberace talent search and performed with Liberace at the Las Vegas Hilton. Her credits include a long list of prizes in national and international competitions and solo appearances with major orchestras around the world. DiMedio has just released her CD of Liszt and Khachaturian Concertos with the Moravian Philharmonic, which will be available at the concert.

Joseph Gold will be playing Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill.” Gold has been praised on four continents for his brilliant interpretations of the great repertoire for violin of the nineteenth-century violin virtuosos of Paganini, Sarasate, Bazzini, and others. A noted musicologist as well as performer, he has discovered many unknown compositions by Sarasate and Paganini, and has premiered several works by twentieth-century composers written especially for him. Mr. Gold is a graduate of the University of Southern California and a former student of the legendary Jascha Heifetz.

Seth Montfort will be playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, in A major. He has been chosen for top picks and critics choice in most of the Bay Area's newspapers and has been the subject of many recent feature articles. At 15, Mr. Montfort became serious about classical music after attending a Denver Symphony Concert at which he heard his first concerto. A couple months later he entered the Denver Symphony's Competition for Young Musicians, won, and made his own concerto debut at 16 receiving a standing ovation, from a thousand person audience, performing Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand with the Denver Symphony. He has since given over 100 solo appearances in 20 different Concertos By Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Saint Saens, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky Korsakoff, Grieg, Scriabin, Delius, Gershwin, Ravel and others with The Denver Symphony, Jefferson Symphony, National Repertory Orchestra, Redwood Symphony, North Bay Philharmonic, Kensington Symphony, Diablo Symphony, and San Francisco Concerto Orchestra. After a 6 year hiatus to focus exclusively on composition, he returned to the piano and stage at age 25 and has since also given over 2,000 solo recitals. He specializes in Chopin, Gershwin and Latin America and Tropical masterworks. He has over 20 hours of permanently memorized repertoire from Mozart to the present. His repertoire is divided evenly between standard European and rarer New World composers.

Karen Bentley Pollick will play Camille Saint-Saëns “Danse Macabre.” She has performed as violinist with Paul Dresher’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble since 1999. She performs a wide range of solo repertoire and styles on violin, viola, piano and Norwegian hardangerfele. A native of Palo Alto, California, she studied with Camilla Wicks in San Francisco. At Indiana University she studied violin with Yuval Yaron, Josef Gingold and Rostislav Dubinsky and graduated with Bachelors and Masters of Music Degrees in Violin Performance. She has several recordings of original music, including Electric Diamond, Angel, Konzerto and Succubus and Ariel View, for which she has received three music awards from Just Plain Folks, including Best Instrumental Album and Best Song. On her own record label Ariel Ventures she has produced Dancing Suite to Suite, amberwood, and Homage to Fiddlers. She filmed Dan Tepfer's Solo Blues for Violin and Piano in Shoal Creek, Alabama in June 2009. Pollick was concertmaster of the New York String Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1984 and has participated in the June in Buffalo and Wellesley Composers Conferences. She has performed in recital at the American Academy of Rome, throughout the Czech Republic in the 2007 and 2008 American Spring Festivals and in England at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. She has appeared as soloist with Redwood Symphony in the world premiere of Swedish composer Ole Saxe's Dance Suite for Violin and Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony and orchestras in Panama, Russia, Alaska, New York and California.

Roberto-Juan González has been Napa Valley College’s orchestra conductor since 1988, and Director of the North Bay Philharmonic Orchestra. He began conducting professionally at 15, in his homeland of Puerto Rico. His career includes concerts with orchestras in Puerto Rico, the United States, and Japan. He has a doctorate in orchestra conducting from Ball State University, where he studied with one of George Szell’s associates with the Cleveland Orchestra, Robert Hargreaves. His last teacher was David Raksin, famed Hollywood composer and assistant to Leopold Stokowski in his tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has conducted the Concerto Orchestra since 2005, and can be seen on YouTube performing Francis Schwartz’ “Concerto for Solo Conductor Without Orchestra.

Complimentary tickets are available to the media by calling Performing Arts Secretary, Maggie Ford, at (707)256-7500.

Dr. Roberto-Juan González
Professor of Music, Orchestra Director
Napa Valley College
Performing Arts Center
2277 Napa-Vallejo Highway
Napa, CA 94558

(707)256-7504
for latest pictures of new Performing Arts Center, click below:
http://gallery.thomasdowdphotography.com/nvc/pac