On Sunday: KSO Chamber Classics Opens With Price, Strauss, and Mozart

 

Florence Price: Octet For Brasses And Piano

Florence Price (1887 – 1953)
Born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price grew up in a middle-class household and attended the New England Conservatory of Music. After her death in 1953, possession of her scores that had not been published went to her daughter, Florence Price Robinson.

When Robinson died in 1975, it was assumed that her mother’s scores were lost to history. Happily, in 2009, new owners of an abandoned house near St. Anne, Illinois. found a substantial collection of Price’s scores and papers that had been left there. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville acquired the works, and has gradually made them available to the public for performance. Included among those scores is Price’s Octet for Brasses and Piano.

 

Richard Strauss: Concerto in E-flat for Horn and Orchestra, Op. 11

Jeffery Whaley, principal horn with the KSO, will perform the Strauss concerto.

“This concerto,” offered Whaley, “was written by an 18-year-old Richard Strauss for his famous horn player father, Franz. Even at that age, you can hear the inventive spark that shines in his later tone poems and operas. What I love most is getting to role-play. I become a melodramatic teenager in the second movement, then shift gears with the orchestra to take the audience to the circus in the finale. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the flutes juggling, strings on horseback, a flying trapeze, and me, as the soloist, attempting a few death-defying feats.”

The concerto is in three movements, performed without pause.

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550

Mozart entered this penultimate symphony into his own catalogue in 1788. Although the record of first performances is murky, a version that adds two clarinets was created for concerts in 1791, concerts that were conducted by Antonio Salieri.