As you remember from our last episode,
we had just celebrated Bach's
birthday by performing all of his Brandenburg
Concerti over two nights
in March. When the smoke from all 329 of those candles clears, we
will be left with just two months left in the season.
On
April 24th
and 25th,
2014, a trip to Scandinavia will be happening. We will musically
travel to Denmark, where the Overture
and Cockerel's
Dance
from Carl Nielsen's opera Maskarade
originated. Pianist Andrew Staupe will perform the ever-popular Piano
Concerto
of Edvard Grieg, Norway's finest composer. We will close with Jean
Sibelius' Symphony
No. 5,
a lesser-known but rich entry from Finland's
symphonic native son.
May's
finale, on
the 15th
and 16th,
holds
music by Beethoven and Shostakovich. The Fidelio
Overture of
Beethoven starts things off, followed by his Piano
Concerto No. 4,
with soloist Spencer Myer at the keyboard. I don't know if I've ever
told you this, but the Beethoven 4th
is a “desert island” piece for me; of the five Beethoven piano
concerti, I find it to be the most soulful and the most quirky,
especially the responsorial middle movement. As infrequently as I
have played it, I'm beginning to think of it as a “dessert island”
piece.
The
grand finale to the season will be Shostakovich's Symphony
No. 10.
Yet again, a work that only has
a number to identify it, but it oozes true Russian soul which
permeates so much of Shostakovich's defiant music. A highlight of
this first symphony after his denouncing the communist party is the
second movement Scherzo,
a powerful maelstrom of a work which is a “musical portrait of
Josef Stalin.”
All
shows start at 7:30 at the Tennessee Theatre.
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