Season Opening Concert: The Timeless Power of Genius
The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle
Sunday, October 1st at 3pm
Fletcher Hall, Carolina Theatre
309 W. Morgan Street
919-560-3030
Tickets: $30. Students Free
The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle opens the 2017-18 Season of Stars with a concert titled The Timeless Power of Genius. Stretching from Austrian Mozart to Russian Shostakovich to Mexican Arturo Marquez, this concert reminds that genius spans the entirety of human experience.
Thanks to a grant from The Durham Arts Council and funding from The Robert Ward Endowment, the orchestra introduces the region and state to the work of Arturo Marquez, performing his Danzon no.2. After Gustavo Dudamel introduced this piece on the program of the Simon Bolívar Youth Orchestra 2007 tour of Europe and the United States, the music of Marquez is becoming known to many international orchestra audiences, particularly in South America. Marquez lives with his family in Mexico City.
The quintessential genius of music is surely Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Posthorn Serenade, composed in 1779 in his Salzburg years is filled with the musical jokes of a 23 year old genius, yet it is also simply delightful music. Whether a deliberate thumbing of his nose at the archbishop of Salzburg or a conflation of three movements of a never finished symphony with two concertante movements plus movements to tie it all together, one thing is certain. Mozart’s music never fails to please. And to this he adds a quirky posthorn, the five note horn of 18th century postal coaches.
One of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century is indisputably Dimitri Shostakovich. He showed this metal early in his Symphony N. 1 of 1925 when it was premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic. Shostakovich was 19. This exciting piece harnesses the 48 musicians of the orchestra for an exciting ride through movements uniting the romanticism of the nineteenth century with the beginnings of modernism. Lorenzo Muti, Musical Director and Conductor of The COT for nearly 30 years will conduct. His reading will show why this symphony was immediately heralded through Europe and America. In 1927 Bruno Walter premiered it in Berlin, rapidly followed by Stokowski in Philadelphia and Toscanini in New York. As Shostakovich’s reputation waxed and waned with the tumult of the 20th century, Symphony No 1 in F minor endured.
