The Madison Symphony Orchestra and Music Director John DeMain welcome Grammy-winning violin superstar Joshua Bell for a one-night-only performance on Saturday, October 6 at 8:00 PM in Overture Hall. Tickets are $85, $63 or $38 and are on sale now through the Overture Center Box Office.
A gala pre-concert dinner at 6:30 PM and a post-concert dessert/coffee reception will be held in Promenade Hall of Overture Center for the Arts. Reservations are $100 per person; black tie optional.
Joshua Bell will perform three works: Max Bruch's glowing Violin Concerto, one of the most popular and recorded concertos in the repertoire; Manuel Ponce's Mexican serenade, Estrellita ("My Little Star"); and John Corigliano's Pope's Concert from the 1998 film The Red Violin, the Academy Award-winning score which Bell recorded for Sony Classical. The MSO will set the stage for Bell with Gioacchino Rossini's rollicking overture to La gazza ladra ("The thieving magpie"), which captures all of the pomp, pathos and humor of the opera. Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition closes the program on a majestic note. With more than two dozen orchestrations (and Maurice Ravel's played here), it is one of the perennial favorites of the classical music repertoire.
A Bloomington, Indiana native, Joshua Bell received his first violin at age four after his parents noticed him plucking tunes with rubber bands he had stretched around the handles of his dresser drawers. He has gone on to become one of the world's great violinists, and has enchanted audiences worldwide for more than two decades.
His 2007-2008 season follows a seminal year highlighted by the coveted Avery Fisher Prize, being the only U.S. musician named by the World Economic Forum as one of the 250 Young Global Leaders, and his appointment to the Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music faculty as a senior lecturer. His discography includes more than 30 recordings, including his September 4 release on Sony Classical of The Red Violin Concerto, a revisiting of his collaboration with John Corigliano.
In his Oscar acceptance speech for The Red Violin score, a jubilant Corigliano proclaimed, "Joshua plays like a God." Joshua Bell recently captured headlines when he performed incognito in a Washington DC subway station as an experiment for The Washington Post. In 2000, People magazine named Joshua Bell one of the "50 Most Beautiful" people in the world. This is Joshua Bell's second appearance with the MSO; he last appeared in September 1988 for Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole for Violin and Orchestra. He last appeared in Madison in a sold-out performance on February 2, 2007, at the Wisconsin Union Theater. -- www.madisonsymphony.org
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