The Diablo Symphony’s annual family concert will be held on March 29 at 2:00 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts. Titled “The Joy of the Symphony,” the concert showcases the instruments of the orchestra in Benjamin Britten’s virtuosic “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” narrated by Bay Area storyteller Josh Kornbluth. Based on a theme by 17th century Baroque composer Henry Purcell, this brilliant introduction to orchestral instruments highlights the woodwind, brass, string, and percussion families individually before uniting them in a final fugue. The joy of orchestral music will also be highlighted in the exciting “Star Wars, Main Theme” by John Williams and Mozart’s Overture from The Abduction from the Seraglio.
The program also features the DSO’s 2026 Yen Liang Young Artist Competition winner Ellie Xuan, who join forces with the orchestra for the first movement of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. Xuan is a seventh-grade student at Gale Ranch Middle School in San Ramon. She studies piano with Dr. Chia-Lin Yang, a faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College Division.
Kornbluth is known in the Bay Area for his one-man shows that humorously draw a connection between his own personal foibles and larger issues relating to personal and societal ethics and the individual’s role in society. His concert film “The Mathematics of Change”—filmed in the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley—tells the uproarious story of a young, aspiring mathematician who unexpectedly discovers his limitations as a Princeton University freshman (he himself left Princeton before graduating). Kornbluth also hosted an interview show on public TV station KQED for two years.