By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Mozart and Schubert, long dead themselves, will pay Benicia a visit this weekend and give residents a chance to remember their own departed loved ones.

The San Francisco Sinfonietta will perform selections from the two masters on Sunday at the Clock Tower in the Arsenal. Maestro Urs Steiner, founder of the 100-member Sinfonietta — which is comprised of a 40-piece orchestra and a 60-member choir — will conduct Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor and Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor.

“I have this concept that I like to bring what we have to another community that may not have that,” Steiner said Thursday. “This is the first time to perform anything over there. We’ve gone out of town many times, but we’ve never been in Benicia.”

Originally from Chur, Switzerland, Steiner founded the Sinfonietta in 1994 with a goal of widening community access to classical music.

He said its first trip to Benicia has two purposes, the first of which is to help raise money for one of the choral singer’s nonprofits — namely Arts Benicia, whose Director Larnie Fox has been a Sinfonietta member for many years.

Steiner and Fox have known each other for at least 20 years. Both Fox and his wife, Bodil, sing in the Sinfonietta, and Steiner and his wife joined Arts Benicia after Fox became its director in 2010.

“I am excited to help Larnie raise money for his organization,” Steiner said.

The visit’s second, more solemn purpose: to memorialize the deceased through music.

Mozart’s Requiem was chosen “because we wanted to remember our people who passed away, so we’ve been gathering names, many names, from people in the community,” Steiner said. “If you do a work piece, why are you doing it? Just to do Mozart’s Requiem because it’s beautiful is good, but not enough. So we decided to make it a remembrance kind of concert.”

The Requiem is Mozart’s last great, unfinished work; Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, likewise, is known as that composer’s “Unfinished Symphony.”

As Steiner said, while both works were unfinished for different reasons, “You can have the connection where some people don’t finish their work because they procrastinate, others can’t finish their work because they pass away.”

Fox said the benefit represents a departure of sorts for his nonprofit, but a welcome one.

“It’s a little bit outside our mission because it’s classical music and not visual art, but it’s something we fully support, and we are thrilled to have them here,” he said.

And Arts Benicia, being a community of artists, is offering its own way for the community to remember lost family and friends.

Artist Sharon Payne-Bolton “is making a spirit boat kind of thing,” Fox said. “It’s a lovely thing she’s working on.”

Payne-Bolton’s spirit boat will contain names of the departed embedded into the boat with encaustics, a form of painting with hot wax. “So you are seeing (the names) through a layer of wax,” Fox said.

Attendees will also be able to write down names and put them in the boat, he said. “It’s a visual art way of remembering people who have died too.”

The Sinfionetta has a Requiem dedication list on its website, sfsinfonietta.org.

To buy tickets to the Benicia performance this weekend, CLICK HERE.

Sharing is caring!