2017-18 Season Hits the Ground Running

Hello!  I'm back.  I've had some time this summer to reflect and clean out my mental in-box, and the 2017-18 season looms on the horizon. I hope you didn't miss me too badly! It's going to be fun, with some old musical friends combining with some new musical trends to create a crop of concerts well worth harvesting. Old friends like Carmina Burana, Dvorak's Symphony No. 8, Scheherazade, Rhapsody in Blue, and Bolero. New trends like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone live with orchestra, and “KSO Unstaged, which promises to break the mold of traditional concert venues. All of this, brought to you by “that old gang of mine,” the players of the KSO.

In the first 23 days of the 2017-18 season, we will be performing six comPLETEly different programs from six different series. Our first Masterworks concert, Knoxville Postcards on September 21 and 22, will be dedicated to the influences of Knoxville on classical music. Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, narrated by Knoxville's poet laureate, RB Morris; Copland's Tender Land Suite, the composition of which is said to have been inspired by Copland's reading Knoxville writer James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and Rachmaninov's captivating Symphonic Dances are the major players in those shows. Hot on the heels of that pair, on the 27th, will be the first Q Series concert at Market Square's Square Room, with the Principal String Quartet performing works of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Piazzolla.

The opening of the Chamber Classics series will be October 1 at 2:30 the luscious Bijou Theatre. Haydn's Symphony No. 60, “Il distratto” (“The Distraught”), Prokofiev's freaky Classical Symphony, and a theater piece by Austrian composer HK Gruber entitled Frankenstein! New concertmaster William Shaub will then launch his build of the Concertmaster recital series on October 4 and 5 at 7:00 with music by Franck, Sarasate and Brahms at the acoustically spacious Great Room of the Knoxville Museum of Art.

On October 7 and 8 we will tap into one of the most successful series of children's books ever written, when we provide the soundtrack to the first movie based on J.K. Rowling's smash success, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone TM  at the Civic Auditorium. (Tickets to this show are sold through Ticketmaster, not the KSO box office). Then, after going FOUR WHOLE DAYS without a performance, we will host the Classical Mystery Tour, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album at the Tennessee Theatre at 8:00 p.m.

Hmmm, I'm going to drift into an advanced state of relaxation, as I am exhausted from simply WRITING ABOUT these concerts. Just wait until they actually happen! Check the KSO website for concert times and venues. Hope to see you there!