By Ted AYALA

In a few days, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra under its music director Sonia Marie de Leon de Vega will be setting off on a new season and, with it, will be bringing local audiences brilliant performances along with engaging programs.

On Sunday, for the first concert of its season, the orchestra will be joined by pianist Robert Thies in Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No.4,” his breakthrough work in the genre of the concerto.

Whereas his earlier essays in that form remained closely hewn to the models of Mozart and Haydn, in this one he redefined the possibilities of the genre. But where much of his music cuts a defiant, even aggressive, profile during this period, the originality of this concerto is conveyed with subtlety, with delicacy.

Beginning with the startling and sunlit piano solo that opens the work, the “Piano Concerto No. 4” is a work that casts its sights on the wide vistas of a new musical language, only now brought down to an intimate, human scale.

Closing the program will be Mendelsohn’s “Symphony No.3,” nicknamed the “Scottish” for the dances and melodies the composer absorbed while journeying through Scotland in 1829. Direct, clear-cut, and sailing with lithe muscularity, the symphony has remained one of the favorites by the composer.

The performance will take place on Sunday, Oct. 26 at Thorne Hall in Eagle Rock’s Occidental College. Tickets for general audiences are $26 and $22; youth (under 17 with ID) are $8. To obtain tickets and more information, visit the Santa Cecilia website at http://scorchestra.org/concertstickets/. They can also be reached by phone at (323) 259-3011.

  Ted Ayala