Sunday and Tuesday

Having just returned from a whirlwind musical trip to Scandinavia, the time has come for the KSO to ride the bus to Southwest Virginia Community College for their Festival of the Arts. We will play with the Camerata Virtuosi New York and the SWCC Chorus. The program includes quite a few French works; we will need to trade our Finnish/English dictionaries in for Le Petit Larousse. Some of the most beautiful music ever written with a French accent will be presented: Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante defunte, Debussy’s Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun, and this gorgeous Faure work I’d never even heard of, Cantique de Jean Racine. Throw in a dose of Prokofiev (first movement of his Piano Concerto No. 1 with pianist Pavlina Dokovska), and it’s safe to say we’re all over the map. This will be Sunday the 27th at 4:00 at the Southwest Virginia Community College’s King Community Center in Richlands, VA.

Back home we go on Tuesday when we will join with the Hardin Valley Academy Strings at 7:00 for a concert of music that shows off the many facets of the string sound. Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Respighi, Michael Daugherty’s funkalicious Strut, and some lush tunes by more recent American composers. This is actually a concert that was postponed from a snow day in February? March? I don’t know, it seems like years ago, now that spring is finally here, but these guys have been waiting to play this concert for a long time and I know they’re psyched! Peggy Jones has again attained great heights with her students, and we KSO core folks get to see what all the cool kids are doing. (Caution to performers: 6:00 sound check!)

I can understand if you can’t make the drive from Knoxville to Southwest Virginia to hear us play, you might say it’s kindly far. But if you’re still willing to travel (or if you get lost on the way to SWCC), (and speaking of spring), be aware that my wife Helen will be performing Beethoven’s Spring Sonata and Brahms’ 1st Violin Sonata with pianist Mark Hussung at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City at 3. And if you can’t make that either, that’s okay, too. I mean, even I can’t go, so who am I to judge....

The final weeks of the season unfold rapidly and there’s a landslide of charts to learn. I may leave a parenthesis unrequited or a sentence fighting for its life, but I will try to keep y’all abreast of our goings on. Ciao!