|
Farmington Valley Symphony Orchestra at Bushnell
 | | Julie Gilligan of Woodbury, a second grade teacher at Noah Wallace School in Farmington, has been a member of the Farmington Valley Symphony Orchestra for 16 years. Photo/Nick Lacey |
|
The 70-member Farmington Valley Symphony Orchestra, now in its 22nd season, makes its subscription concert debut in the Belding Theater at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, 166 Capitol Ave. in Hartford on Saturday, February 8 at 8 p.m. Soloists Brunilda Myftaraj on violin and Eric Dahlin on cello will perform the Brahms Concerto for Violin and Cello. They will also join the FVSO as principal violin and cello for a performance of the Shostakovich Symphony No. 15. The Northern Star Fanfare by American composer Libby Larsen will open the concert.
The FVSO is directed by John Eells, who was educated in England at York University and completed graduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has guest conducted the Hartford, Jacksonville and Spokane Symphony Orchestras, and the Hermitage State Orchestra in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is currently music director of the Simsbury Light Opera Company.
The program opens with The Northern Star Fanfare, a short fanfare for brass written by the American composer Libby Larsen (b. 1950). Larsen was the first woman invited to be composer in residence of a major American orchestra and remains one of this country’s most prominent living composers.
Brahms’ great double concerto was his last work written for the symphony orchestra. It originated from sketches for a fifth symphony but was developed into a concerto in 1887 for Joseph Joachim, for whom he had also written the violin concerto, and Robert Hausman, the cellist in Joachim’s string quartet. Brahms conducted the first performance with Joachim and Hausman as soloists in October 1887 in Cologne.
The program concludes with Dmitri Shostakovich’s 15th and final symphony, written in 1971 in a very short period of eight weeks. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1906 and died in Moscow in 1975 after an extraordinary career. His 15th symphony was unveiled in Moscow in January 1972, conducted by the composer’s son in front of a sold-out audience of 2,500. The performance was a triumph. It is a work that, like many of Mahler’s symphonies, seems to suggest a lifetime of experiences, a remarkable work by one of the most important of symphonists.
The FVSO performs six regular season concerts at venues throughout the Greater Hartford area, including the Lincoln Theater at the University of Hartford, Centennial Theater in Simsbury, and Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, where the popular outdoor event is an annual favorite. The orchestra enriches the musical lives of both the players and audience in the Greater Hartford area by presenting classical music in concerts that include non-standard repertory and are preceded by an informative pre-concert talk that begins half an hour before the performance.
Tickets are $12 general admission, $10 for senior citizens and $5 for students; children (12 and under) are admitted free of charge. For more info call 860-651-9962, or visit <fvsoct.org>.
| 
)