October 16, 2011 – Animal Tales Concert

October 16 – 3:00pm

October 16, 2011 – The Maple City Chamber Orchestra will perform two major works for children of all ages on Sunday, October 16, at 3 p.m. in Sauder Hall at Goshen College. The concert is free and open to the public.
This family program, an annual fall event, will include Prokofief’s classic musical tale “Peter and the Wolf” and a new musical suite “Aesop’s Fables.” Both are narrated pieces, with the narrations to be performed by Jay Mast and Sara Klassen, theatre students at Goshen College.

According to Brian Mast, conductor, “This will be the Midwest premiere performance of the “Aesop’s Fables” piece, and by also playing “Peter and the Wolf” we are recreating the program of the premiere performance of “Aesop’s Fables.”

Serge Prokofief (1891-1953) composed both the music and the story of “Peter and the Wolf” in 1936 for a concert in Russia. It has become a standard work for introducing children to both classical music and the instruments of the orchestra.

The story is about Peter, whose carelessness allows a duck to leave a fenced yard and be swallowed by a wolf. With the help of a bird, Peter lassoes the wolf and takes him to a zoo. Each character is played by a different section of the orchestra. For instance, the strings are Peter, the oboe is the Duck, the French horns are the wolf, and the flute is the bird.

“Peter and the Wolf” has been played in concert and recorded countless times; made into animated films, beginning with Disney in 1946; and choreographed as a dance.

“Aesop’s Fables,” which was inspired by “Peter and the Wolf,” is a very new work, having been premiered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in February of 2010.

The five fables from Aesop in the suite are Tortoise and Hare, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, The Nightingale and the Labourer, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and The Fox and the Grapes.

The composers are Art Wheeler and Paul Reisler, with narration by Tom Paxton. Reisler is a music educator noted for his Kid Pan Alley project of teaching children in schools to compose and perform their own songs. Paxton is a singer and composer of folk songs who has won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Following the concert, exotic daffodil bulbs from the garden of Steve Shantz, orchestra member, will be for sale in the lobby, to help make possible the orchestra’s free concerts.

The Maple City Orchestra presents four free concerts each year in Sauder Concert Hall. The next concert, a program with the Goshen Community Chorus for the Christmas season, will be Sunday, December 11, at 3 p.m.

The 45-member volunteer orchestra, which relies on individual and corporate financial support, 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.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2011 at 6:58 pm and is filed under 2011 - 2012 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.