Symphony concert to feature dramatic works

Symphony
concert to feature dramatic works

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News staff

Three powerful and dramatic works kick off the Shepherd
School’s symphony orchestra concert March 26.

The symphony
orchestra will perform Paul Hindemith’s “Symphonic
Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber,” Béla
Bartók’s “Piano Concerto No. 2” and
Claude Debussy’s “La Mer.”

The concert will
be conducted by Larry Rachleff, music director of the Shepherd
School symphony and chamber orchestras. Jeffrey Neufeld,
a winner of the 2003 Shepherd School Concerto Competition,
will perform the Bartók piano solo.

Hindemith was
not only a composer. He was also a performer and led the
Frankfurt Opera orchestra and played the viola for a quartet.
He wrote chamber music and orchestral pieces and also operas,
concertos and sonatas. One of the main innovators of musical
modernism, Hindemith also composed music in other genres,
such as lieder, newly invented music and music for children.

Hindemith finished
“Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von
Weber” in 1943, and it was performed in New York in
1944. It has become one of his most popular pieces.

Like Hindemith,
Bartók fled Europe during World War II and settled
in America. Bartók wrote piano pieces, violin pieces,
orchestral pieces, operas and ballets. During his lifetime,
he avidly collected, arranged and studied folk music. “Piano
Concerto No. 2” was composed in 1931.

The last symphony
orchestra piece is Debussy’s “La Mer.” Debussy
was a French composer who founded the Impressionist movement
in music. He is known for refusing to abide by the rules
of traditional music theory.

The free concert
begins at 8 p.m. in Stude Concert Hall in Alice Pratt Brown
Hall.

The next symphony
orchestra concert will take place April 23 and features
“Overture to Colas Breugnon by Dmitri Kabalevsky, “Piano
Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18” by Sergei Rachmaninoff
(Robert Roux, soloist) and “Le Sacre du Printemps”
(The Rite of Spring) by Igor Stravinsky. Tickets are $7
for adults and $5 for senior citizens and students. For
ticket information, call 713-348-8000.