May 7 – 7:30pm
| What: | Dance into Spring Concert |
| When: | 7:30pm, Saturday, May 7, 2011 |
| Where: | Goshen College Music Center, Sauder Concert Hall |
May 7, 2011 – In its concert, “Dance into Spring,” on Saturday, May 7, the Maple City Chamber Orchestra will welcome the season with sprightly music by Anton Dvorak, Edvard Grieg and Franz Schubert. The free concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Sauder Hall at Goshen College.
Brian Mast, conductor, says, “I am very excited to end the season with this lively program of music, which is as fun to listen to as it is to play.”
The concert will open with “Slavonic Dance No. 1” by Anton Dvorak (1841-1904), who composed 16 such dances from 1878 to 1886, originally for four hands at the piano. They were inspired by Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, two of which the orchestra played in its March concert.
Unlike Brahms, who used folk tunes for his dances, Dvorak composed original melodies, although he used the traditional rhythms of Slavic folk music. “Number 1” is in the “furiant” dance form, featuring fast and brilliant music with surprising, shifting accents.
The second number in the program will be the “Peer Gynt Suite No. 1” by Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), which uses four of the many pieces of incidental music that Grieg composed in 1876 for the 40-scene verse drama “Peer Gynt” by his fellow Norwegian Henrik Ibsen.
The four sections are “Morning Mood,” “Ase’s Death,” “Anitra’s Dance” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” This classical music has become a part of popular culture as well, as it has been used in many films (Pied Piper of Hamelin) and television shows (The Simpsons) and reinterpreted by jazz musicians (Duke Ellington) and rock bands (Apocalyptica).
The major work in the concert will be “Symphony Number 3 in D Major” by Franz Schubert (1797-1828). He composed it in 1815, when he was barely eighteen years old, although it was not known and appreciated until its publication, following his death, in 1840. The symphony resembles the neo-classical work of Haydn and Mozart, although Schubert’s last symphonies were more romantic, like Beethoven’s.
The symphony is unusual in opening with a short, somber Adagio that is followed by a long, dramatic Allegro section. Following Allegretto and Menuetto movements, the symphony concludes with a Presto movement, in a vigorous tarantella dance form.
This will be the last concert of the 2010-2011 season for the Maple City Chamber Orchestra, which presents four free concerts a year in Sauder Concert Hall. “This has been a great concert season for the orchestra, which has grown in size over the year,” says Mast.
The 45-member volunteer orchestra relies on individual and corporate financial support. It was founded in 1996 by Goshen native Michael Ruhling, now associate professor of Fine Arts/Music at the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology.
The orchestra offers an e-mail newsletter, obtainable through its website www.mcco-online.org.
