University Philharmonia Concert

The University Philharmonia, under the direction of Alexander Jiménez, presents their first concert of the 2017-2018 concert season on Thursday, October 5, 2017, at 7:30 PM in Opperman Music Hall. Works for the evening include Mozart’s Overture to the Magic Flute, Janáček’s Idyll Suite for String Orchestra, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 “Little Russian”.

The program includes:

• Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute
• Janáček Idyll for String Orchestra
• Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 “Little Russian”

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last opera, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), was an unparalleled gift to the opera world. Mozart completed most of the opera in June and July of 1791 in the resort town of Baden, as his wife was resting prior to giving birth to the couple’s sixth child. Die Zauberflöte is in an operatic genre called a Singspiel (a German-language mixture of sung and spoken dialogue) that was popular with the Viennese public.

Although Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) was born directly in the middle of Western music’s great period of Romanticism, music lovers today seldom group him with such composers as Brahms, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky. Unlike those boisterous masterworks that would later make Janáček famous (the Glagolitic Mass, the Sinfonietta, the Taras Bulba rhapsody, and his many late operas), his more understated Idyll for String Orchestra comes from a much earlier time.

In their attempt to neatly categorize the works of the great composers, music history textbooks tend to label Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) as an “internationalist,” differentiating him from his contemporaneous compatriots who were bent on composing only “nationalist” music. While in the rural city of Kamenka in June of 1872, Tchaikovsky felt inspired to begin sketches on a Second Symphony, a work that would prominently quote several Ukrainian folk melodies. By November, Tchaikovsky had begun the process of orchestrating the symphony, and had a finished product by the end of the year.

This performance is free and open to the public.