Laura Hamilton, member of the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and former Livermore resident, comes home to play the Mendelssohn violin concerto. This famous composition ushered violin concerti repertoire into the Romantic era with its lyrical intensity and structural innovations and has long been a standard by which violinists are measured. The evening opens with the Richard Wagner’s overture to his comic opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 6 blends German influences designed to please Viennese audiences with expressions of his own Czech nationalism to produce a mature work which would surely be as well known as his “New World” symphony if it had been tagged with an equally catchy nickname.

Laura Hamilton is principal associate concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. During her 24-year tenure with the Metropolitan she has led hundreds of performances and has been concertmaster for live international high-definition video transmissions of Salome, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, and Nixon in China. Hamilton was previously a member of the Chicago Symphony and appeared with that orchestra as concerto soloist with Sir Georg Solti conducting. During her youth, Hamilton lived in Livermore and studied with local teachers Marion Clark and Robert Jacobson, and Daniel Kobialka of the San Francisco Symphony. She performed with LAS in 1976 as a winner of the Symphony’s Competition for Young Musicians and played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with the orchestra in 1983.