Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1841 Duration: 35 minutes It is easy to forget that there was quite a bit...
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Category: Program Notes
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Ge Xu (Antiphony)
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1994 Duration: 8 minutes Chen Yi is just one of a noted group of composers...
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Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1894 Duration: 10 minutes Debussy was a critical figure in the transition from 19th-century romanticism...
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Children's Corner, arr. Caplet
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1908/1910 Arranged for orchestra by André CapletDuration: 17 minutes 1905 marked a special time in...
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Suite of Dances
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes The music of Florence Price has experienced a renaissance in recent years. Price worked hard to overcome racism...
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Mozart, Horn Concerto no. 3 in Eb Major, K. 447
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Unless you are a horn player, the horn is not the instrument usually associated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart....
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Symphony no. 4 in A Major,
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes In 1830, the world was Felix Mendelssohn’s for the taking. Just barely into his twenties, the young German...
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Adagio for Strings
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes … Wistful. Nostalgic. Touching. Few pieces bring to mind as many emotion-filled adjectives as Samuel Barber’s Adagio for...
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Serenade for Strings
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Few composers have possessed the ability to reflect emotions within their music as well as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky....
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Memorial to Martin Luther King
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Oskar Morawetz was one of Canada’s most successful composers. Yet many audiences have not heard his music. Morawetz...
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Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments displays several sides of the Russian-French-American composer’s compositional personality. Its clear form,...
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Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman no. 1
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes American composer Joan Tower certainly fits into the category of “uncommon.” As a female composer coming of age in the...
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Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 55, “Eroica”
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes If just one adjective were offered to describe Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the word “more” might come to mind....
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Piano Concerto no. 1 in G Minor, op. 25
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes It is sometimes easy to forget that Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) died at just 38-years-old, perhaps because his published...
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Grass: Poem for Piano, Strings, and Percussion
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the...
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Carmen Suite
Russian pianist-composer Rodion Shchedrin (b. 1932) is young enough to have avoided the worst of Stalin’s “Reign of Terror” years, but still spent most of his career maneuvering Soviet expectations and restrictions. To his credit, he was one of the most successful and prolific...
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Serenade after Plato's Symposium
Have you ever imagined what it would be like to attend dinner with a carefully selected group of historical figures? What would the conversations be? How would guests respond to one another? After reading Plato’s Symposium, Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) was inspired to musically depict just that scenario. Serenade for Violin, Harp, Strings, and Percussion shows Bernstein’s intellectual approach to creating music.
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The Brandenburg Concertos
Three hundred years ago, in August 1721, Johann Sebastian Bach was at a crossroads. For four years, he had been in the employ of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. A true music lover, the prince was quite supportive of...
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The Tender Land Suite (1954/1996)
America of the 1950s was a very different place than that of the 1940s. Gone were the New Deal politics of Franklin Roosevelt and the...
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Church Street Serenade (2005)
Aaron Copland and Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) have several things in common: both were born and raised in New York—Copland in the city and Hailstork...
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Appalachian Spring: Ballet for Martha (1944)
What is it about Copland’s music that evokes such feelings of nationalism and nostalgia? Some would point to the composer’s use of open intervals of...
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Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
Beethoven’s fifth symphony is the iconic work of classical music. It pervades the whole world of symbols and imagery of musical art as an evocation of a welter of ideas. In a sad way it is almost impossible to escape all...
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Sholem Aleichem Rov Feidman!
This delightful work is nothing less than an inspired concert tribute to the amazing tradition of klezmer clarinet. Klezmer is the traditional music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. From its centuries-old antecedents...
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Four Sea Interludes, Op. 33a from Peter Grimes
Benjamin Britten is one of the last century’s most respected composers, and unquestionably the most influential and admired British composer from WW II, until his death in 1976. Fantastically gifted from an early age...
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Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56A
Good things often come in modest packages, and this work is unquestionably an example of that rule. We have often observed that Johannes Brahms was the major successor to the legacy of Beethoven, in a century filled with...
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Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54
This work was Robert Schumann’s first piano concerto, the best of the lot, and deservedly one of the most popular in the repertoire. He composed in almost all of the common genres and, notwithstanding his success in the larger forms...
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Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 7
According to Clara Wieck Schumann, “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?” She must have written these dark words in a moment of despair...
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Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn Overture
History is cruelly reductive, and it is the natural state of our collective memory that it often bears little resemblance to the balance of affairs that characterized the past. Whole lives, bodies of creative work, and popular acclaim of significant artists commonly disappear...
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Yesterthoughts and Punchinello (1900)
Irish-born American composer Victor Herbert (1859–1924) was quite prolific. He wrote many piano pieces, songs, choral works, orchestral suites, concertos, and chamber compositions, but is...
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The Light of Three Mornings: Sketches of Braintree Hill
As if to remind us that Ireland and Scotland are not the only places with rolling, green hills and breathtaking views, Gwyneth Walker’s The Light...
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Irish Suite for Strings (1940)
A quick look through a list of Arthur Duff’s composition titles reveals his musical philosophy: Irish stories are best told with Irish-sounding music. The composer’s...
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Suilean a’Chloinne (Children's Eyes) (2010)
In 2006, a familiar figure to the Fort Collins Symphony, conductor and violinist Leslie Stewart, approached Scottish-born composer Jennifer Margaret Barker (b. 1965) with a...
