Sound Off at a Special Time!

This coming Friday and Saturday, I’ll be hosting our preconcert event Sound Off at a special time – 6:00pm. This is because the Honor Orchestra of America will be performing at 7:00pm, before the ISO hits the stage at 8:00pm, for this week’s performances in the Symphonic Hits series. We invite you to make a full evening of it at the Hilbert Circle Theater with Sound Off and the two performances!

The ISO performance will feature wonderful staples of the repertoire, with guest conductor James Gaffigan leading a program that opens with Rossini’s Semiramide Overture and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, and then features Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and soloist Stephen Hough on the second half.

As usual, for Sound Off, we’d love for you to send us questions in advance (about orchestral music in general, or the ISO in particular) that we may feature in our segment “The Audience Wants to Know.” You can submit your questions by commenting on this blog post, posting on the ISO Facebook page, or emailing it to soundoff@indianapolissymphony.org.

To give you a little taste of what’s in store on this week’s concerts, I’ve collected some YouTube videos of the repertoire – some “standard,” and others not so much :-)

We’ll start with a normal performance – this is Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic with Rossini’s Semiramide Overture.

And now, a much more unusual arrangement – for 16 pianists on 8 pianos!

Here’s a classic performance from 1962 of the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto, with soloist Van Cliburn and conductor Kirill Kondrashin, in Moscow. This is the beginning of the first movement - the rest of the concerto is easily available on YouTube as well.

And then, I couldn’t resist including musical comedian Victor Borge’s riff on the opening of the concerto:

Finally, here are a couple of videos related to Beethoven’s 2nd Symphony. First, an introduction to the work, created by Jan Swafford for the Boston Symphony.