Fall Concert

Experience the joy of live orchestral music at our Fall Concert!

The program:

Sergei Prokofiev, Lt. Kije Suite — Composed for a 1934 film (“Lieutenant Kije”), one of the earliest sound films made in the Soviet Union, the plot and score have been described as “a satire on the stupidity of royalty and the particularly Russian terror of displeasing one’s superior.” The lieutenant in question does not exist; he is a bureaucratic mistake, but because the officials in question can’t admit their mistake, they make up ever more fantastic tales of the phantom lieutenant, until he “dies” in battle. The suite contains instantly-recognizable melodies, including the “Troika” section often used as Christmas music.

Luise Adolpha LeBeau, Original Theme with Variations (arr. Zachary May) — Born in 1850, LeBeau composed a wide range of music, including piano works, songs, chamber music, and larger-scale orchestral and choral pieces. In her later years, she focused more on writing about music and reflecting on her experiences as a woman composer in a male-dominated field. Her memoirs, “Lebenserinnerungen einer Komponistin” (“Memoirs of a Female Composer”), published in 1910, provide valuable insights into her life and the challenges she faced. The LeBeau music on our program originated as a solo piano piece, Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 3. It has the feel of an early work with a certain didactic quality. By the same token, in its present string arrangement it makes for very effective teaching material for aspiring players. There are ten variations, differentiated largely by rhythmic embellishment. May’s arrangement, transposed to E minor from the original F minor, follows the original sequence of variations, including the shift to the parallel major, E major, for the lyrical variations 5 and 6.

Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14 — One of the most creative and dramatic works in the symphonic repertoire, this five-movement work was composed when Berlioz was just 26. This symphony, radically new for its time, has inspired a rich repertoire of orchestra pieces stretching over more than a century. They cover program music or tone poems—compositions where the composer associates the work with some extra-musical source such as a play, an historical event, a poem, painting, or scene. Symphonie Fantastique follows a narrative – a young man, obsessed by love, hears a haunting melody associated with the idea of his beloved. He attends a ball, hearing a waltz theme, and sees his beloved. He is in the countryside, listening to shepherds piping a tune and hears the haunting melody. He dreams he has killed the object of his love and is being led to the scaffold. Finally, he dreams he is at a nightmarish witches’ Sabbath, scene of his own funeral. This work is almost cinematic in its sweeping and thrilling emotions.