Big Week on Stage: World Premiere from KSO, ‘Patsy Cline’ at Clarence Brown, Puccini from Knoxville Opera

Knoxville Symphony Orchestra

For Knoxville Symphony Orchestra fans, every concert has some compelling component—a hugely popular work performed with passion or perhaps an unknown gem lurking just out of sight, at last finding the listeners it deserves. This week’s concert is a bit different in that it is featuring the World Premiere of Michael Schachter’s Violin Concerto: Cycle of Life. The work, commissioned by the KSO, was inspired by “Cycle of Life: Within the Power of Dreams and the Wonder of Infinity,” the intriguing glass-and-metal installation by glass artist Richard Jolley that has become quite familiar to visitors at the Knoxville Museum of Art.

Originally, the premiere of Schachter’s work was scheduled for the spring of 2020, but we all know what happened then. With performances shut down and the impact of that shutdown seeping into artistic consciousness universally, Schachter decided to revisit the work. In his program notes for the Violin Concerto, he explained what ensued.

“In the intervening two years,” Schachter says, “I found the pandemic immensely impactful on my thinking around the piece. As scary and disorienting as the initial months of fear and quarantine were, I felt humbled in the growing realization that this kind of population-level disruption wasn’t a fluke of our time: it was the norm of human history, indeed the history of all life. And yet, through all uncertainty and unrest, through war, plague and famine, the human need to gather and make community through music and artistic expression has been universal, knowing no boundary of race, creed, or status. The arts are no superfluous privilege, as our school budgets might have one believe: they are absolutely core to whatever it is that makes us human. Locked down at home with two small children for many months on end, I found myself stripping the concerto down to the studs, rewriting it from the ground up. I wanted something less polished, less deferential to its predecessors or accommodating of my artistic insecurities. More raw. Elemental. Less head, more heart.”

The concerto has seven movements that follow divisions in Jolley’s piece:
1 –“Primordial”; 2 –“Emergence”; 3 – “Flight”; 4 – “Desire”; 5 – “Tree of Life”
6 – “Contemplation”; 7 – “Sky”

Violinist Tessa Lark will join Maestro Aram Demirjian and the KSO to perform this World Premiere. Demirjian will complete the connection on the concert with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27.

Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Masterworks
“Cycle of Life”
Thursday and Friday evenings, April 21 and 22, 7:30 PM
Tennessee Theatre, 604 S. Gay Street
Tickets and Information

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Clarence Brown Theatre – Always… Patsy Cline

This popular musical had a sold-out CBT run in 2003, returning now with the true story of Patsy Cline’s long friendship with a fan, Louise Seger. The show features 27 classic songs including “Crazy”, “Walkin’ After Midnight”, “She’s Got You, Sweet Dreams”, and “Back in Baby’s Arms”.

Directed by Terry D. Alford, Always…Patsy Cline stars Laura Beth Wells as Patsy Cline and Deanna Surber as Louise Seger.