May 27th - Civic Orchestra of Victoria

Hello all,

It's the end of the regular orchestra season now, and with that comes the last Civic Orchestra concert, which is mostly about composers writing about their homelands.

• Sibelius – Finlandia - an old favorite for good reasons. It's meant to evoke the landscapes of Finland, as well as the history of the Finnish people, and it was written in protest against an increasingly repressive Russian regime. You can hear them in the low brass, at the start of the piece.
• Dvořák – My Homeland Overture - Dvorak is famous for including folk melodies, rhythms and idioms from his homeland, which is what is now the Czech Republic, so I'd argue that almost anything he wrote would fit the theme of this program. But this one, though rarely performed, contains what eventually became the Czech national anthem. It's also the overture for what was originally incidental music for a play.
• Coulthard – Prayer for Elizabeth - This is my first time playing any Coulthard, and I was delighted to learn that she was a composer from Vancouver. This piece was written on commission from the CBC, in 1953, in honor of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It's the most modern-sounding of any of the works I've played with the COV so far, it's for strings only, and it plays a bit like a really big string quartet as some string-only pieces do.
• Brahms, J. – Symphony No. 1 - Brahms took 21 years to write this, because he was trying to make something as good as Beethoven's symphonies, but that was his own thing, that stood on its own. I think he succeeded, and this contains some of my favorite musical moments in this program. There's a lot of fun playing and lush sonority in here; it starts out moody and and angry, and ends with self-assured grandeur.

As usual, we'll be at the Dave Dunnet Theatre in Oak Bay; this is at 2pm on May 27th.

More information and tickets are available here.

Also, for those of you who were wondering, I'm so glad to say that the concert I wrote about in my last newsletter raised nearly $6000.00 for earthquake relief.