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Symphony’s April concerts will be great events
By Gary MacDonald
There are four excellent reasons to attend the Symphony of the Kootenay’s April concerts April 12 and 13.
1. Overture to William Tell. This is apocryphally known as the Lone Ranger music. William Tell was Rossini’s last opera, composed in 1832. He never wrote another note, dying in 1868. You have all listen to his tunes in the Looney Tune, Daffy Duck and Bug Bunny cartoons.
2. West Side Story Suite, Leonard Bernstein. Again, to avoid shocking patrons, the music from the West Side Story is put into an orchestral suite. Fans of the late Natalie Wood will recall her fondly.
3. A Shostakovich Suite. Shostakovich is the most prominent Russian composer of the 1930s to ‘50’s. His misfortune was to be a great artist under Stalin. His memoir, Testimony, could only be published after his death. He reviled Stalin and showed it in his music. Stalin and his flunkeys never understood. Lucky for Shostakovich.
4. The Elgar Cello Concerto in E Minor. This piece gets its own heading because of its beauty and importance. It is ‘the’ cello concerto in the classical repertoire. Elgar was the composer for the music of the British Empire at its late Victorian and Edwardian height of power. The Empire covered the globe, Britain ruled the waves and their God was English (he/she is now American). Elgar wrote Land of Hope and Glory, which will be sung by the English as long as there is an England.
Then August 1914 came and the slaughter of the First World War shocked Europe. Elgar stopped composing music. He was extremely saddened and depressed by the war. As an artist, he could not create.
In 1922, he picked up his pen and composed the E Minor. After he finished, Elgar never wrote another note. He died in 1934.
The E Minor expresses in a most beautiful way all the tragedy, the sadness, the melancholy of the horrible waste and destruction that was WWI, the melancholy for a world that was destroyed by the war and a culture and world that would never be the same again.
The music is rich, effulgent, gorgeous; you will not leave the theatre unaffected.
Tickets are at about $30 a seat. I intend to give up food for three days to save the money to buy mine!
The April 12 show begins at 7:30 p.m. and the April 13 show begins at 2 p.m.
