Associated Musings

Greetings all!  Sound Off, the preconcert event that I host, returns to its usual time (6:30PM) for this Friday and Saturday night’s concerts in the ISO’s Symphonic Hits series.  This week’s program presents a wonderful variety of music led by guest conductor Krzysztof Urbanski:  Lutoslawski’s Little Suite, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, featuring pianist Dejan Lazic, and Dvorak’s beloved Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”

As usual, at Sound Off this week, we’ll talk some about the music on the program, take your questions, and chat with a couple of ISO musicians, going “backstage” to find about life as a performer.  We invite you to also submit in advance your burning questions about orchestral music and the ISO, for the segment I call "The Audience Wants to Know."  You can submit them by commenting on this blog or our Facebook page.

The Dvorak and Mozart are staples of the orchestral repertoire, but I’m particularly excited for Indianapolis audiences to discover the first work on the program, Lutoslawski’s Little Suite, which the ISO has never performed before.  (And I will confess that I’m also excited to discover it myself, as I’ve never heard it live either!)  This is a work that, despite having been written under some artistically restrictive and repressive conditions (I’ll talk a bit about this at Sound Off), displays remarkable ingenuity and charm, molding actual folk melodies into a very convincing 10-minute suite.  There are no recordings of it on YouTube, so I thought I would pique your interest with another work that seems to me in a similar folk-inspired spirit (although this one does not quote any actual folk tunes):  Bartok’s Dance Suite.



Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 is one of the brightest jewels in his consistently brilliant set of such works.  Here is a very fine performance by Zoltan Kocsis, with Jirí Behlohlávek and the Virtuosi di Praga.



For Dvorak’s legendary Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” I turned up several interesting things on YouTube.  First is a wonderfully creative transcription for solo guitar by the guitarist Jorge Caballero, also performing here:



The Chicago Symphony does a concert series called Beyond the Score, where they break down major works in detail, examining them both in historical context and musical content.  They’ve made available on YouTube the complete video of their Beyond the Score program on Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9.  Here is Part I, and the remainder is also easily found on YouTube.



Finally, here is a fantastic performance by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic of the last movement of the symphony.  (This is only the first part, but the remainder is also available on YouTube).



See you at the Symphony!