Bard Conservatory Orchestra Celebrates Works of Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams in March 11 Performance
Left; Hugo Valverde. Right; Barbara Jöstlein Currie.
The Bard Conservatory Orchestra presents a concert celebrating works by Robert Schumann (1810-56), Richard Strauss (1864-1949), and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director, the program will feature Schumann’s Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra, Op. 86, with horn players Erik Ralske, Javier Gándara, Hugo Valverde, and Barbara Jostlein Curry; Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), Op. 24, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “A London Symphony.” The performance will be held on Saturday, March 11 at 8 p.m. in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. To reserve tickets, visit fishercenter.bard.edu, or call 845-758-7900 (Mon-Fri 10 am-5 pm).
Schumann was one of the earliest champions of what is known today as the French horn. All three movements of the Konzertstück, written by Schumann in 1849, are played without pause, demanding the utmost of the four horn players, giving them the fanfare-type material commonly associated with the horn, but also plenty of lyrical melodies. He considered this work to be one of the best he had ever written.
At its inception, the symphonic poem was a bold attempt to create drama without words and to test music’s expressive powers to the fullest. The genre found a practitioner of genius in the young Richard Strauss. In a series of orchestral works that established him as one of the leading avant-gardists of the day, Strauss did not hesitate to tackle in his music the most complex literary and philosophical topics possible. “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist,” Strauss wrote of Death and Transfiguration in 1894.
Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers wrote that Vaughan Williams was a “double man,” deeply immersed in the Christian tradition and yet a self-described agnostic, looking into the future while spiritually most at home in the past. The “city,” to his way of thinking, was the antithesis of the “country”; it represented culture as opposed to nature, bustling activity as opposed to rural tranquility—and the composer, in a sense, was drawn to both. London, therefore, was both a real place and a metaphor for Williams who, in his 45-minute A London Symphony completed in 1913, combined descriptive realism and philosophical meditation.
Post Date: 02-14-2023
Schumann was one of the earliest champions of what is known today as the French horn. All three movements of the Konzertstück, written by Schumann in 1849, are played without pause, demanding the utmost of the four horn players, giving them the fanfare-type material commonly associated with the horn, but also plenty of lyrical melodies. He considered this work to be one of the best he had ever written.
At its inception, the symphonic poem was a bold attempt to create drama without words and to test music’s expressive powers to the fullest. The genre found a practitioner of genius in the young Richard Strauss. In a series of orchestral works that established him as one of the leading avant-gardists of the day, Strauss did not hesitate to tackle in his music the most complex literary and philosophical topics possible. “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist,” Strauss wrote of Death and Transfiguration in 1894.
Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers wrote that Vaughan Williams was a “double man,” deeply immersed in the Christian tradition and yet a self-described agnostic, looking into the future while spiritually most at home in the past. The “city,” to his way of thinking, was the antithesis of the “country”; it represented culture as opposed to nature, bustling activity as opposed to rural tranquility—and the composer, in a sense, was drawn to both. London, therefore, was both a real place and a metaphor for Williams who, in his 45-minute A London Symphony completed in 1913, combined descriptive realism and philosophical meditation.
Post Date: 02-14-2023