October 4 - Voyage of Passion: Elgar and Beyond

Music Director & Conductor Toshiyuki Shimada’s 16th season leading the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra will rousingly begin, as usual, with The Star-Spangled Banner. The four other works on the program all had their premieres—in London, Vienna, and St. Petersburg—with the composer conducting. ECSO Instrumental Competition Winner Nicholas Hammel, a master’s candidate at Yale with degrees from the University of Texas and New England Conservatory, will perform Sir Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B Minor, first performed in 1910.Johann Strauss’s Spanish March, composed in the 1830s, is a spirited and stately piece that evokes the flair of Spanish ceremonial style through a Viennese lens. Johannes Brahms’s Haydn Variations, composed in 1873, is also known as the Saint Anthony Variations, since the eight variations are based on a “Chorale St. Antoni” from a piece for winds probably misattributed to Joseph Haydn. Fourteen years later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed his caprice on Spanish themes, Capriccio espagnol, a five-movement suite in which the strings at times imitate guitars. The fourth moment opens with five lively cadenzas, by the trumpets and horns, violin, flute, clarinet, and harp.

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