The Nazareth College Music Department is pleased to present Spring Fever, its final Wind Symphony (Dr. Jared Chase, conductor) concert of the 2016-2017 season in Linehan Chapel on Friday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m. The concert will feature a number of students, faculty, and guest artists performing a wide repertoire, and is free and open to the public.
Spring Fever will open with one of the most beloved pieces in the band repertoire, Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy, featuring guest conductor Colleen Richarson, director of bands at Canada's second largest music school, Western University. The ensemble will then premiere a composition entitled Light by Nazareth College student Lincoln All, winner of the Music Department's 2017 Composition Competition. The concert's first half will end with a performance of David Biedenbender's new saxophone concerto, Dreams in the Dusk, featuring Nazareth saxophone professor, Chisato Eda Marling.
The concert will conclude with Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968. The 1969 Pulitizer Prize-winning composer passed away in December and the Wind Symphony will honor his life, music, and continued support of the wind ensemble with a performance of his most performed work. In January, The New York Times published an article about Husa that included the following about the composition: "In Music for Prague 1968, a response to the Soviet Union's crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement, he (Husa) incorporated a 15th-century Hussite anthem used previously by Dvorak and Smetana to connote solidarity and resistance, alongside eerie, unsettling microtonal passages and instrumental effects evoking bird song, church bells, Morse code and gunfire." The piece was given its premiere by the Ithaca College Concert Band in January 1969, becoming one of the most-played works in the wind-ensemble repertoire, with more than 10,000 known performances to date. Mr. Husa also created an orchestral version, a rendition of which was included on Shadow of Stalin, a live album by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic released in 2008.
"I don't think of it as a political message for one country," Mr. Husa said of the work in a 1986 Los Angeles Times interview. "It is universal."
Mare Millow | Marketing & Publicity Manager | Nazareth College Arts Center | mmillow7@naz.edu | 585-389-2093
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