Romance is in the air for UWO Symphony Orchestra's first concert

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By Communications Staff
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
The Romantic Era sweeps the stage at Alumni Hall for UWO Symphony Orchestra's first concert of the season on Sunday, Oct. 18.
 
An insouciant French flute piece by a composer who only wrote music he liked to listen to, a set of variations based on an English composer’s friends, and a piano concerto for which the solo part was not written out before the first performance, make up the 3 p.m. program, titled “A Romantic Celebration.”
 
The two soloists are winners of the Don Wright Faculty of Music’s concerto competition.
 
Mark Prince will play Jacques Ibert’s Flute Concerto, first written for French flute player Marcel Moyse in 1934.  Its heritage stems from the flute theme in Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres midi d’un faune of 1894. The work is a mix of virtuosity and lyricism, crafted carefully but with a casual French twist, giving a sense of refinement and flamboyance. The first and third movements are dances, separated by a sweet and soulful Andante.
 
Neal Cabigon takes Beethoven’s place in the composer’s third piano concerto. It was written soon after his first symphony and shows large, authoritative gestures and an original approach to the first movement with no trace of Mozart or Haydn. Although Beethoven wrote it in 1800, it wasn’t performed until 1803, and he didn’t complete the piano part until 1804.
 
His page-turner at the first performance was alarmed by all the blank pages, a few with little more than odd scribbles as clues for the composer.  A big orchestral introduction signals the more equal pairing of group and soloist. Early critics viewed this shared responsibility as a flaw, but today’s perspective is the opposite.
 
Beethoven also proved the critics who said he couldn’t write tunes wrong by creating a sensory slow theme in the second movement. The rondo includes an impressive fugal segment with a race to the finish. It’s a jubilant release from the rapture of the Largo.
 
Edward Elgar struggled with teaching and gigging on organ and violin for many years. His Enigma Variations, performed in 1899, was one of the first works to bring him widespread recognition. The title refers to a hidden theme that runs in fragments throughout the variations.
 
He wrote “Dedicated to my friends pictured within,” giving musicologists a name-that-person game for years to come. Amateur musicians, family, an 18th-century house and the biblical hunter Nimrod, as well as the composer and his wife are given musical representation.
 
Regarded as England’s greatest composer of the Romantic era, Elgar eventually was named Master of the King’s Musick and made a baronet.
 
The UWO Symphony Orchestra’s range of repertoire is broad to fit its educational mandate to study and perform all representative works from the standard symphonic repertoire.

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