Sugar, Spice, Folk Songs and Golijov
There’ll be sugar and spice and everything nice on the next Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra concert April 17 and 18 at Music Hall. CSO music director Paavo Järvi will conduct.
For sugar, there’s the orchestral music from Berlioz’ lush, dramatic “Romeo and Juliet.”
(The complete symphony, which includes arias and choruses, has been performed by the Cincinnati May Festival but – astonishingly – only three times in its 135-year history, most recently in 1981.)
You’ll get lots of spice in Mauricio Kagel’s 1996 Etude No. 3. Written for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam (and premiered by former CSO music director Michael Gielen), it is a richly colored study in rhythmic complexity within a more or less constant pulse. Often cacophonic (but strictly according to method) the eight-minute work smoothes out towards end and concludes on a triumphant major chord.
For everything nice, you can’t beat violinist Christian Tetzlaff and the Brahms Violin Concerto.
Concerts are at 8 p.m. both nights. Admission is $12-95, $10 for students and children, 25% off for seniors (age 62 and over). ZIPTIX, good for 25% off remaining seats in limited areas, are available from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the day of the concert.
Friday night is also the last "College Nite" of the CSO season. For $10, college students can buy both a concert ticket and admission to an after-party in Corbett Tower at Music Hall where they may meet and mingle with Järvi and the CSO players, enjoy free appetizers, a cash bar and live music. This week's band is the Faux Frenchmen. To reserve a ticket, call (513) 381-3300.
Call (513) 381-3300, or order online at www.cincinnatisymphony.org
The Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra concludes its spring Folk Festival at 2 p.m. Sunday in Memorial Hall in Over-the-Rhine. The one-time-only concert will be led by CCO music director Mischa Santora.
Guest artist is soprano Sarah Wolfson in Italian composer Luciano Berio’s 1964 “Folksongs.” This attractive work, a song cycle comprising folk music from around the world, includes two songs made famous by Kentucky ballad collector John Jacob Niles, “I Wonder as I Wander” and “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.”
The program will feature the world premiere of Joel Hoffman’s “…repercussions…” commissioned by the CCO.
Professor of composition at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Hoffman is also founder/artistic director of CCM’s outstanding new music festival MusicX. Discontinued in 2008 for budgetary reasons, the festival has been “outsourced” to Blonay, Switzerland, where it will continue June 22-July 3 as Music09.
The concert will open with Dvorak’s Serenade in D Minor, Op.44.
Tickets are $15-$50, $10 for students, and may be ordered online at www.ccocincinnati.org or by calling (513) 723-1182.
It’s not too soon to prepare for the Cincinnati Opera Summer Festival. That’s why the opera’s popular and informative Opera Raps were created. The next one in the series is April 14 and will focus on Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov’s one-act “Ainadamar: Fountain of Tears,” to be performed in its 2005 revised version July 9 and 11 at Music Hall.
Guest speaker Desiree Mays, author and resident speaker for Santa Fe Opera where the revised version premiered, will be joined by opera artistic director Evans Mirageas at noon at the Mercantile Library and 7 p.m. in the Taft Museum of Arts’ Luther Room.
“Ainadamar” is based on the life of Spanish poet/ playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who was martyred during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 at the age of 38. Eighty minutes long and hauntingly beautiful, the work has virtually entered the repertoire, with repeated performances and a Grammy-winning recording that topped the Billboard classical music charts in 2006.
Admission is $5 at the door. (Reservations may be made by calling 513-241-2742.)