Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Masterworks Series: William Shaub and the Pines of Rome
Maurice Ravel: La Valse
Samuel Barber: Violin Concerto
Carlos Simon: The Block
Ottorino Respighi: Pines Of Rome
Tennessee Theatre, 604 S. Gay Street
Thursday and Friday, January 20, 21, 7:30 PM
TICKETS AND INFORMATION
Who knew that Einstein’s relativity applied to music? For those listeners that frequent the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s Masterworks concerts, it may seem like eons of time have slowly ticked away since their last such appearance in November. For the orchestra’s players, though, it has been a busy and short two months filled with a mind-bogglingly diverse range of concert content, from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker with Appalachian Ballet, to the annual Holiday Concerts, to the incredibly entertaining Bugs Bunny at the Symphony, to Sunday’s Night with The Arts: A Concert in Celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This week, the KSO’s Masterworks Series returns to the Tennessee Theatre for its January installments, a pair of concerts that promise to explode with musical color—Ravel’s La Valse and Respighi’s vivid Pines of Rome to begin and end, surrounding Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto and Carlos Simon’s The Block in the middle. KSO Concertmaster William Shaub will be the violin soloist in the Barber. Maestro Aram Demirjian will conduct.
Respighi’s Pines of Rome (1924) is the second of three impressionistic tone poems comprising a Roman series, beginning with The Fountains of Rome (1916) and ending with Roman Festivals (1928). The first U.S. performance of Pines of Rome came at Carnegie Hall in 1926 with the New York Philharmonic under conductor Arturo Toscanini. The program notes from that debut concert offered that the composer “…uses nature as a point of departure, in order to recall memories and visions. The century-old trees which dominate so characteristically the Roman landscape become testimony for the principal events in Roman life.”
Despite a painful birth involving its commission and subsequent development, Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto has become a centerpiece of the American 20th Century violin concerto repertoire. For those that look forward to Concertmaster Shaub’s solo opportunities, this should not only be a delightful display of vocal-like violin lyricism, but also a signpost of the composer’s musical evolution.
Preceding the colorful The Pines of Rome on the concert is a short orchestral study by American contemporary composer Carlos Simon, The Block. [The KSO previously performed Simon’s Portrait of a Queen last March for a limited audience. Read the review.] The Block is impressionistically descriptive, based on six paintings by Romare Bearden of different buildings in one Harlem block. Bearden’s paintings involve a variety of art mediums such as watercolors, graphite, and metallic papers. Simon’s musical adjectives follow this variety and seeks to explain the visual energy of an urban landscape.
