Music Director Daniel Meyer will lead the orchestra with solo cellist Mark Kosower in works of Haydn, Elgar, and Davies. The concert will be repeated on Sunday, March 18th at 3PM at the Porter Center in Brevard.
The concert will begin with the delightful Symphony No. 104 in D major ("London") by Franz Joseph Haydn. The last and best known of the 12 symphonies Haydn wrote in London, this is one of the greatest works of the popular Austrian composer. Haydn said that his years in London were the happiest of his life, and the sunny music of this piece reflects the composer's mood.
After intermission, the Symphony will perform two pieces by English composers of the twentieth century. Cellist Mark Kosower will join the orchestra in a performance of the Concerto for Violoncello, Op.85, in e Minor, by Edward Elgar. Kosower is the Principal Cello of the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in Germany and is also on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In 2002 he was the recipient of the distinguished Avery Fisher Career Grant, awarded to young artists by New York's Lincoln Center. He has performed solo recitals at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and at the Frick Collection in New York, and has appeared as soloist with the Ravinia Festival in Chicago and many other prestigious orchestras.
Elgar's cello concerto is a great favorite of professional cellists, due to its deep feeling. Written in 1919 when the British composer was 62 years old, the piece was described by the eminent music critic Ernest Newman with the words: "profound wisdom and beauty underlying its simplicity "¦ the realization in tone of a fine spirit's lifelong wistful brooding upon the loveliness of the earth." Elgar was devastated by the results of the First World War, and wrote in 1917, "Everything good & nice & clean & sweet is far away - never to return"Â. This great concerto was his way of savoring the beauty in life despite all the loss caused by the brutal violence of the age.
The concert will conclude with Peter Maxwell Davies' An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise. The composer is a resident of Orkney, located on the far northern tip of Scotland, and provided the following description of this work: "This was written for the Boston Pops Orchestra as a commission for its centenary, and conducted at the first performance by John Williams. It is a picture postcard record of an actual wedding I attended on Hoy in Orkney. At the outset, we hear the guests arriving, out of extremely bad weather, at the hall. This is followed by the processional, where the guests are solemnly received by the bride and bridegroom, and presented with their first glass of whisky. The band tunes up, and we get on with the dancing proper. This becomes ever wilder, as all concerned feel the results of the whisky, until the lead fiddle can hardly hold the band together any more. We leave the hall into the cold night, with echoes of the processional music in our ears, and as we walk home across the island, the sun rises, over Caithness, to a glorious dawn. The sun is represented by the highland bagpipes, in full traditional splendour."Â
Tickets for the performance at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium are available through the Symphony or the Asheville Civic Center box office, and range in price from $49 to $17 (with discounts available for students). -- www.ashevillesymphony.org
Posted March 13th, 2007 by ruzik_tuzik
