Conductor’s Choice
Saturday, May 4, 2013
McKinley Presbyterian Church
5th & John Streets, Champaign
with Bernhard Scully, horn
W. A. Mozart: Symphony No. 25
Richard Strauss: Horn Concerto No. 1
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5
The most symphonic of this season’s concerts contains three of our Music Director’s personal favorites, each highly dramatic in its own way. Mozart’s 25th Symphony opened Peter Shaffer’s brilliant film Amadeus in startling fashion and will do the same for this program. We’ll feature the remarkable talent of the University of Illinois’s horn professor in Strauss’s first concerto for that instrument. And Vaughan Williams’s 5th Symphony will close the evening, running the gamut from sublime beauty to powerful and fiery passion.
7:00 PM Concert Conversation
7:30 PM Concert Begins
Previously this season:
America’s Music
Friday, November 16, 2012
Faith United Methodist Church
1719 S. Prospect Ave., Champaign
with Chip Stephens, piano
and Chip McNeill, tenor sax
Henry Cowell: Saturday Night at the Firehouse
Henry F. Gilbert: Suite for Chamber Orchestra
John Harbison: Remembering Gatsby: Foxtrot for Orchestra
Harold Arlen: Blues in the Night
Charlie Chaplin: Smile
Charlie Parker: She Rote
George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and . . . jazz. There’s no music more American than that. This concert celebrates America’s music, and America in music, from Cowell’s nostalgic depiction of Saturday night socials to Harbison’s homage to the Jazz Age. The second half features two local jazz greats from the University of Illinois School of Music: tenor sax player Chip McNeill in his own arrangements of jazz standards, and pianist extraordinaire Chip Stephens in Gershwin’s iconic “jazz” concerto.
A Windy Affair
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Holy Cross Catholic Church
405 W. Clark St., Champaign
with Prairie Voices
Laurie Matheson, director
George Frideric Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks
Arvo Pärt: Fratres
Igor Stravinsky: Mass
Maurice Duruflé: Four Motets on Gregorian Themes
Arthur Bird: Serenade for Winds
The wind and brass sections of The Prairie Ensemble have always been especially strong, and this concert features them (almost) exclusively, with special guests Prairie Voices, a recently formed local choir. The concert opens with Handel’s grand celebration for winds and drums and closes with an award-winning American work from 1898. The resonance and beauty of Holy Cross Church will provide the ideal setting for the central portion of our program, from Stravinsky’s spare Mass setting to Pärt’s ethereal evocation of a procession of monks.