Season Six has a Theme!
/From the get go, we've enjoyed pulling together our concerts with a theme. We could just plop together any old music we like, but where's the challenge in that? This season we've taken it to the next level, and have a theme uniting our entire concert series.
Each of our five programs this year connects in some way to theater. This idea originated when we discovered the newly discovered original score to a work by the famous Aaron Copland and built a program around it. From there we kept building our season and bit by bit realized that with we could work out a theme for our entire series! We're really excited to present our first concert in just two weeks. Rehearsals began this past weekend, and were a blast.
Our first concert is titled DANCE, and includes the "new" work by Copland, as well as 4 tangos in some form or another! Here's a little bit about this concert.
Copland wrote some incidental music to a play in 1940. Quiet City was a flop as a play, so Mr. Copland took his score for quartet and arranged it for string orchestra, trumpet and English horn. You can read more about how the original scoring was recently published here in last weeks blog post.
We built this program around Quiet City, which has the unique instrumentation of trumpet, saxophone, clarinets and piano. We added a few instruments to that ensemble to build out the program.
The concert begins with a short piece titled "Breakdown Tango" by American composer John Mackey which was composed to be danced to, although not as a traditional tango! It's a wild and raunchy affair that will spice up the kick off to our sixth season!
We finish the program with another ballet score by an early 20th Century composer, Martinu. (He's Czech, but the music is all French.) La Revue de Cuisine is about a love triangle between kitchen utensils. Yes, you read that right, kitchen utensils. Want to read more about how "Dishcloth makes eyes at Lid but is challenge to a duel by Broom?" (click here) As you might imagine the music is delightful, playful and full of dance numbers. there's a Tango, a Charleston and a March for seven instruments. We're excited to have Dawn Weber playing trumpet with us on this piece and the Copland! Check out her website, she's got about one million cool things going on.
At this point in the program development process, we figured we'd better add a few more dance numbers to the program to keep the theme going. Pulling in the suite of dances from Stravinsky's trio arrangement of his famous L'historie du Soldat was an easy fit (or not so easy for Kyle who has to play maybe the most difficult Tango ever written for violin), and we get to Dance with the Devil for a minute or so, which should be fun. We also threw in a slow tango by the tango master, Piazzolla, and wham, we've got a program all about theater and dance!
So put your dancin' shoes on and join us on Sept. 6 at The Chapel for a great time! Tickets are on sale here.
Program details are available here >