Welcome to the 2024-2025 Orchestral Season! We start in grand style with Franz von Suppé’s rousing horserace, the Light Cavalry Overture. Von Suppé was born in Split, Croatia and this piece will be familiar to aficionados of both Saturday morning cartoons and Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concerts. The middle section is a typical Hungarian csárdás. This is the music of the elaborately uniformed Hussars, skilled horsemen who were armed lightly for greater agility in battle, and who figure prominently in the plot of the opera.
Music historians all agree that two pieces altered the history of the orchestra. These are obvious. One is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony which was about three times longer and infinitely more complex than anything that came before. Also, it was the first to utilize a choir. The second is also obvious –Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which in 1913, broke open the whole concept of rhythm and infinitely expanded the boundaries of what was possible with a symphony orchestra. However, there is a third ground-breaking piece, Gustav Mahler's monumental 1st Symphony, The Titan, which will follow intermission. This work demonstrated that completely disparate and unrelated elements could be combined and assembled to create a vast musical structure and a great symphony.
At the age of 28, Mahler had just been appointed to his first major conducting post: Music Director of the Royal Opera House in Budapest. In this same year, he completed The Titan which included many of the sounds from his youth in the Bohemian countryside. He mixed melodies from his own songs with Austrian Landlers, Habsburg military marches, waltzes, and even a rather amateur Klezmer band. This symphony always provides a bombastic and exhilarating evening for both audience and musicians.
For our solo feature, I asked one of our excellent clarinetists, David Salge, if he would like to perform a concerto. We agreed that it should be a major work but one that was not too well known and overly played. Then we both went off separately to research repertoire. A couple of days later, we reconvened and interestingly, we had both chosen the same piece, the Clarinet Concerto in A Minor by Charles Villiers Stanford.
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) is one of Ireland’s most popular composers and one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music. His famous pupils include Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst (The Planets). Composed in 1902, this concerto has three distinct sections or movements, but the composer has linked them so that it is played in one continuous performance.
The Titan opens Sunday, October 13, 2024 at 3:00pm at The Central Kitsap Performing Arts Center, 10140 Frontier Pl NW in Silverdale.
Tickets are available Here
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