Not To Be Eclipsed, KSO Celebrates the Cosmos With A Festival

 

Knoxville is awash in “festivals” of different kinds every March, April, and May, so admittedly, we may become a bit numb from all the excitement. Not to worry, it’s a way to shake off the gloom and winter doldrums and immerse oneself in some enlightening pursuits and diversions. While Knoxville mostly missed the celestial entertainment of the Total Eclipse this week due to cloud cover and rainy weather, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s Cosmos Festival will not require special glasses or rain gear, but—at most—a ticket or two.

The first of two concerts is on Sunday afternoon, April 14, at the Bijou Theatre. That concert in the popular Chamber Classics Series will feature three orchestral works that were included on the Golden Record mounted on NASA’s Voyager spacecraft that were launched in the summer of 1977. The record was encased in a protective aluminum jacket and included a cartridge and a needle with instructions in symbolic language to indicate how the record was to be played. Along with greetings in many languages, the pressing included an eclectic variety of Eastern, Western, and ethnic music. Three of those selections were Movement 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, the First Movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, and the “Cavatina” from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13.

KSO music director and conductor Aram Demirjian is bookending those three works in an essential way, opening with Primal Message by Nokuthula Ngwenyama. To close, Maestro Demirjian has chosen the equally essential “Jupiter” Symphony—the Symphony No. 41 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

On the following Thursday and Friday, April 18 & 19 at the Tennessee Theatre, the KSO will continue its Cosmos Festival with its April Masterworks pair of concerts. Of course, no concert titled as “Cosmos” could possibly avoid Gustav Holst’s The Planets. While the orchestral suite composed between 1914-17 has as much to do with the composer’s interest in astrology as astronomy, the work has come to represent a sense of grandeur and our search for adventure, traits that led us to space exploration.

Astronomers, amateur or otherwise, will notice that Holst’s seven-movement suite does not include our most familiar orb, Earth; Pluto, removed from full-size planet status in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, was not discovered until 1930.

Maestro Demirjian has filled the remainder of the program with three works of intriguing character: Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute, Jonathan Leshnoff’s Piano Concerto with pianist Joyce Yang, and Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. The Leshnoff work, co-commissioned by the KSO along with the Harrisburg and Tucson Symphony Orchestras, had been previously scheduled with pianist Yang for the September, 2022 concert, but had to be re-scheduled due to an injury to Ms. Yang.

Like many of the works of Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question escaped notice and performance during most of the composer’s life. Written in the first decade of the 20th Century, the work was first performed in a chamber orchestra arrangement in 1946, with the premiere of the original version not coming until 1984.

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Knoxville Symphony Orchestra: Cosmos Festival