Governor John Baldacci has proclaimed November as Augusta Symphony Orchestra Month in recognition of its contributions to the cultural life of the capital city area and especially to honor its New England premiere performance of the Karlowicz Violin Concerto on Sunday afternoon, November 9, at 3pm at the Cony High School Auditorium.
Under the direction of long time maestro Paul Ross, the ASO will play three works central to the Romantic Era. The best known, of course, is the Academic Festival Overture by Johannes Brahms, written in 1880 as a sort of ‘thank you’ to the University of Breslau. The eminent composer was being feted with an honorary doctorate and he conducted the very first performance of the overture in early 1881. Possessed of an impish sense of humor, he slipped in some old and disreputable student drinking songs among the more upright passages, much to the dismay of the scandalized academics. The kids loved it, however.
One of Brahms’s admirers was the young Bohemian composer, Antonin Dvorak, who was taken under his wing, securing for the young Dvorak some very lucrative publishing contracts. Dvorak went on to a career that certainly rivaled, and may have even equaled Brahms’s, with a set of nine symphonies, a number of superb tone poems, and dozens of exceptional chamber music. The ASO will feature Dvorak’s Overture: My Home, his opus 62, written only a couple of years after the Academic Festival Overture. As with almost everything that Dvorak wrote, this musical homage to his homeland is brimming with superbly lyrical music.
The center piece of the concert will be the Violin Concerto by Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, born in 1879 to well-off academic parents in modern Lithuania. After training as an instrumentalist, Karlowicz was increasingly drawn to composition and was well on his way to greater international acclaim when he was killed in an avalanche while skiing in 1909. His surviving works include a symphony, a set of symphonic poems and his Violin Concerto, composed in 1902. It is written in the standard three movements and features brilliant brass writing.
Our soloist, Kinga Augustyn, is a young, prize winning virtuoso, born in Poland and now residing in the US. She comes to us from New York, where earlier in the year she had her Carnegie Hall debut to great acclaim.
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