Maestro Michael Morgan and the Oakland East Bay Symphony (OEBS) present the results of a collaboration with the California Poets in the Schools' "Words and Music" project at 8 tonight at Oakland's Paramount Theatre, 2025 Broadway.

Meanwhile, Mitchell Sardou Klein and the Peninsula Symphony (PSO), in combination with British theatrical director Giles Havergal and actors from American Conservatory Theater's Master of Fine Arts program, will demonstrate music's affinity with words — specifically the words of the great William Shakespeare — at 8 tonight at the Fox Theater in Redwood City and at 8 p.m. Saturday at Flint Center in Cupertino.

Highlighting the Oakland concert is the world premiere of composer Hector Armienta's composition for narrator, chorus and orchestra based on the prize-winning poem "Where Waters Meet" by Sonoma County fifth grader Hailee Brumley.

Hailee herself will serve as narrator for the performance, which coincides with the 40th anniversary of California's "Poets in the Schools," a program dedicated to providing literary arts education to more than 35,000 students annually.

The "Words & Music" project, sponsored by The James Irvine Foundation, is yet another of the numerous examples of Morgan's community outreach efforts. This year's project resulted in 650 student poem submissions from seven California counties. Seven poems were selected finalists before one was chosen winner.

During a telephone chat earlier this week, Armienta said he had read hundreds of the poems himself.

"But, I was especially moved by Hailee's poem," he noted. "It explores what it is to live, die, and then to merge into something greater, all of which are symbolized by the flow of water through streams and springs, and eventually into the ocean."

To illustrate how mature and insightful the poem written by such a young person seemed to him, he quoted its beginning lines: "I come from where the waters meet ..." and its final line: "I come from where, for some it is the beginning, and for some, it is the end."

Armienta, who lives in San Jose, was born in Los Angeles in 1962. His father was from Culiacan, Mexico, and his mother, also of Mexican descent, was born in San Antonio, Texas. Intent on taking piano lessons like his older sister, he began composing music before he was 10. At 11, his parents decided that he too should be given piano lessons. He eventually attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and studied composition with Conrad Susa.

Armienta has composed works involving orchestra, chorus and soloists. He also has a passion for composing bilingual operas. Among these are "Un Camino de Fe/A Journey of Faith" and "Los Conejos y las Conejas/The Coyotes and the Rabbits," as well as an in-progress trilogy of operas, which hedescribes as containing a bit of "Mexican and Latin American magical realism" based on experiences of his grandmother.

A fervent believer in bringing the benefits that exposure to and training in music brings to children, Armienta's day job is working as a consultant in arts education in San Jose.

"My goal," he says, "is to make the arts integral in the lives of children."

Other works on tonight's program are Verdi's Overture to "I Vespri Siciliani" and Chabrier's "Espaa" performed with members of the Oakland Youth Orchestra. Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" features guest conductor Bryan Nies.

Tickets cost $15-$60. Call (510) 625-8497 or (415) 421-8497.

Musical Shakespeare

On the Peninsula side of the Bay, the Peninsula Symphony's indefatigable Maestro Klein and the multiple award-winning Havergal have plotted out an exciting program titled "Shakespeare & Love." The program showcases the symphony playing Mendelssohn's incidental music for Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Berlioz's "Beatrice and Benedict Overture" and Prokofiev's evocative ballet score for the Bard's "Romeo and Juliet."

However, the most unique aspect of PSO's concerts will be the live dramatizations by 17 well-seasoned ACT actors of selected scenes from the Shakespearean works that inspired the chosen music.

According to Klein, "Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Prokofiev all had distinct relationships with the words of Shakespeare."

Mendelssohn, he explained, was (unhappily) serving the Prussian head-of-state Wilhelm IV in Berlin in 1843 when he had the good fortune to be asked to compose what was to become a remarkable picture of the fairy-like "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Berlioz, a literary fellow to begin with, fell in love with both the words of Shakespeare and actress Harriet Smithson at age 24 when he saw her in "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet" in Paris. He was so moved that he eventually composed music for "Romeo and Juliet" and the 1862 opera "Beatrice et Benedict" based on "Much Ado About Nothing" — and married Smithson.

Prokofiev composed his "Romeo and Juliet" ballet suite in 1935 in order, writes Klein, "to preserve his reputation as an accomplished Russian composer."

Performances are 8 tonight at the Fox Theater, 2215 Broadway, Redwood City, and at 8 p.m. Saturday at Flint Center, Highway 85 at Stevens Creek Blvd., Cupertino. Tickets are $21-$27. Call (650) 941-5291.

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