Sunday Spotlight: Pianist Emi Kagawa & KSO Chamber Orchestra—Mozart, Beethoven, McKay

Yes, September is a Beethoven month for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.

Following last week’s opening Masterworks concert that featured Beethoven’s phenomenal Fifth Symphony, KSO is opening its Chamber Classics Series on Sunday afternoon at the Bijou, offering the composer’s Fourth Symphony, a work that Robert Schumann famously termed “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants” referring to its lithe and nimble place between the Eroica symphony and the Fifth.

Also on the concert, KSO Principal keyboardist Emi Kagawa returns to the solo spotlight as pianist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17. Audiences will remember her 2023 Chamber Classics performance on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27, a performance that we noted in the Arts Knoxville review: “Kagawa’s articulation throughout was sensitive and deliberate in its design, but without sacrificing melodic fluidity or her ultimate interpretative destination.”

A second bonus on the concert is a KSO-commissioned work written by East Tennessee composer Dosia McKay, The Lure of the Flowering Fern. The composer’s program notes promise enchantment and mystery in music form—

“According to the Baltic and Slavic legends, in the deep, impenetrable forest, once a year, on the eve of the summer solstice, at the stroke of midnight, blooms the rarest botanical wonder, the fern flower. Its arrival is heralded by thunder, as its petals begin to glow like a diamond, with gold, purple, and blue radiance. This spectacle is short-lived for the fragile bloom is destined to wither before the coming of the dawn…If one is extraordinarily lucky to find the blossom, one must never pluck it, but rather gently shake it onto a pristine linen cloth and then swiftly wrap it to be carried safely and secretly back home, or else it will vanish into thin air.”