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54th Season Concerts

Simply Remarkable!

 

Concerts for the 2015-2016 Season


Student and Teachers

October 11, 2015

3:00 p.m.

 

Salieri's Sinfonia in D


Haydn's Cello Concert #1 in C Major

with Brannon Cho on cello

Winner of the Bonnie and Lee Malmed Young Artist Competition


Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral"

 

The SVSO opens its season by exploring the influence of teachers on students—and presents our talented first-place winner of last spring’s Young Artist Competition. As a rising composer and virtuoso pianist, Ludwig van Beethoven sought lessons in Vienna from two renowned teachers—Antonio Salieri and Franz Joseph Haydn. Salieri was at the center of musical life in the Hapsburg capital. He conducted premieres of several of Beethoven’s works in addition to teaching the young artist. Haydn was recognized as the greatest composer of his day. In 1792, as Beethoven departed his native Bonn for Austria, one of his benefactors predicted that in Vienna Beethoven would “receive Mozart’s spirit through Haydn’s hands.” 

He did.


Darkness to Light

November 15, 2015

3:00 p.m.

 

Brahm's Tragic Overture


Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20


Dvořák's Symphony No. 8


In the waning days of autumn, the SVSO takes a musical journey from darkness to light—from the somber valleys of Johannes Brahms’ tormented and turbulent Tragic Overture, through Wolfgang Mozart’s restrained but affirming Piano Concerto in D Minor, and on to the sunny Bohemian uplands of Antonín Dvořák’s exuberant G Major symphony.


The Power of the Human Voice

February 14, 2016

3:00 p.m.


Fauré's Requiem

featuring the Music Institute of Chicago Chorale


Brahm's Symphony No. 4


The SVSO and guest artists perform a familiar choral work by Gabriel Fauré and Johannes Brahms’ fourth symphony, the ultimate expression of his “orchestral voice.” Lush and quietly moving, Fauré’s Requiem is his best-known composition, offering a vision of death as an aspiration towards happiness above. Brahms’ powerful final symphony is one of the most significant orchestral works of the 19th  century—“original, individual and rocklike,” and pervaded by “autumnal warmth and strength.”


Pictures at an Exhibition

April 16, 2016

7:00 p.m.


Ravel's Mother Goose


Ravel's Piano Concerto in G

featuring Esther Berg on piano

Bonnie and Lee Malmed Young Artist Competition Winner


Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition


The SVSO plays three of Ravel’s vivid, multi-hued works for the orchestra—and presents the talented pianist winner of last spring’s Young Artist Competition. Maurice Ravel wrote many of his finest orchestral works for the piano, later transforming them into orchestral masterpieces full of astonishing tone colors and instrumental effects. This was the case with his Mother Goose, which he wrote as a piano duet and later turned into an exotic orchestral suite. Ravel once said, “I believe that a concerto can be gay and brilliant” without aiming for profundity. His own Piano Concerto is a model of gaiety from its opening note—punctuated by the crisp snap of a slapstick—onward through jazzy interludes. The SVSO concludes its season with a performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Maurice Ravel’s dazzling orchestral transcription.