From the Deutsche Grammophon’s “The Chicago Principal,” our first hour features Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3, Dale Clevenger, principal French horn player of the Chicago Symphony, playing under Claudio Abbado.
It’s Heinz Karl Gruber’s birthday (1943), so we’ll hear him in dual roles, as conductor and as composer. We begin the evening with ‘The Cannon Song’ from Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” Gruber conducting Das Palast Orchester; a bit later we’ll hear the same group doing the ‘Foxtrot Potpourri’ from “Threepenny” as well as Weill’s “Suite panameenne.” And we’ll start our final hour with Gruber’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Gruber conducting the London Sinfonietta, with Ernst Kovacic, violinist. To quote The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, H. K. Gruber's violin concerto “hints at, skirts, and finally devolves radiantly upon a pop song by Gruber himself. While some may consider ‘diatonic serialism’ to be an oxymoron, Gruber's music regularly exemplifies it in inspired style, intricate but deceptively natural.”
Other features during the evening include: Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Cello Concerto No. 1, Antonio Meneses soloing with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Galicia under Victor Pablo Perez; George Phillip Telemann’s Overture in D with the Collegium Aureum; and finally—the “Farewell” Symphony by that trickster, Franz Joseph Haydn, who had his orchestra members leave the stage as this music progressed, until only two violinists were left, Haydn himself and the concertmaster. All to convince his patron that the musicians had been kept far too long at the summer palace and needed to get back home to their families. It worked! Good music, and a vacation…at long last.
It’s Heinz Karl Gruber’s birthday (1943), so we’ll hear him in dual roles, as conductor and as composer. We begin the evening with ‘The Cannon Song’ from Kurt Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” Gruber conducting Das Palast Orchester; a bit later we’ll hear the same group doing the ‘Foxtrot Potpourri’ from “Threepenny” as well as Weill’s “Suite panameenne.” And we’ll start our final hour with Gruber’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Gruber conducting the London Sinfonietta, with Ernst Kovacic, violinist. To quote The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, H. K. Gruber's violin concerto “hints at, skirts, and finally devolves radiantly upon a pop song by Gruber himself. While some may consider ‘diatonic serialism’ to be an oxymoron, Gruber's music regularly exemplifies it in inspired style, intricate but deceptively natural.”
Other features during the evening include: Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Cello Concerto No. 1, Antonio Meneses soloing with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Galicia under Victor Pablo Perez; George Phillip Telemann’s Overture in D with the Collegium Aureum; and finally—the “Farewell” Symphony by that trickster, Franz Joseph Haydn, who had his orchestra members leave the stage as this music progressed, until only two violinists were left, Haydn himself and the concertmaster. All to convince his patron that the musicians had been kept far too long at the summer palace and needed to get back home to their families. It worked! Good music, and a vacation…at long last.
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