“Evolution,” the 27th season of the Laredo Philharmonic Orchestra, continues with its second concert, “Of Life and Death,” Sunday, Nov. 19 at 4 p.m. at Laredo Community College in the Guadalupe and Lilia Martinez Fine Arts Center theater.
Under
the baton of maestro Brendan Townsend, the Laredo Philharmonic Orchestra will
perform music from three master composers, including Rapture by American
composer Christopher Rouse, Four Last Songs TrV 296 by Richard Strauss
and Symphony No. 1 in C minor by Johannes Brahms. The latter two are
noted German Romantic composers.
The concert will feature guest soloist Suzanne Ramo, a noted soprano who has performed with the San Francisco Opera, the City Opera of the Quad Cities, the Tulsa Opera and the Amarillo Opera, among others.
A native of Cheney, Wash., Ramo joined the LCC faculty as an adjunct instructor of voice in spring 2005 and became a full-time member of the faculty in fall 2005.
The concert also will feature the “Music by Numbers” system. Screens onstage display numbers corresponding to detailed programs, which explain the music.
In Rapture, the piece is all about mood, with the speed, the intensity and the dynamic consistently growing, Townsend noted.
“Christopher Rouse has established a world-wide reputation as the creator of scores that often possess a driving, almost brutal energy,” Townsend said. “After a decade of writing fairly gloomy music, in the late 1990s he made a deliberate attempt to change the mood of his music and in 2000 the premiere of Rapture showed that he had created his ‘most light-filled’ (composition) of all.”
Four Last Songs, which Strauss wrote in five months during the final year of his life, is based on the tradition of a lied, a poem set to music and sung, Townsend explained.
“The tradition of a lied began with Schubert, continued throughout the Romantic era and slowly became expanded outwards to include songs written for orchestral accompaniment,” Townsend said.
He added that the four songs Strauss wrote are “imbued with a sense of nostalgia for the great master at the end of his life. Throughout these four songs there is a general mood of melancholy, transience and death.”
Strauss wrote the Four Last Songs after returning to his native Bavaria from a self-imposed exile in Switzerland.
Brahms wrote Symphony No. 1 in C minor Op. 68 at the age of 43 when he felt confident enough about his orchestral and compositional techniques and traditional forms to compose his first symphony.
For many years, Brahms apparently felt the “ghost of Beethoven” breathing down his neck due to a comparison to the great master that came early in Brahms’ compositional career, Townsend noted.
“What is striking about this symphony is the deference he gives to the classical forms used by the great symphonist that came before him. Though almost 50 years had passed since the premiere of Beethoven’s final symphony, and Romantic composers had turned their back on the restrictions of these older forms, Brahms set to present his symphony much as a classical composer would—using sonata form.”
Townsend added that the “infamous main theme is a tribute to the type of theme” heard in Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
Admission is free and open to LCC and TAMIU students with a valid student ID card.
Tickets are $25 for adults and $17 for adult seniors. Tickets may be purchased at IBC Bank (Plantation/Mall del Norte 1), Wells Fargo downtown, and at the business offices of LCC and TAMIU. Tickets also will be sold at the door on the day of the concert.
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