The FSU College of Music and the University Symphony Orchestra invite you to join us for the first USO performance of 2018 on Saturday, February 3 at 7:30 p.m. in Ruby Diamond Concert Hall. Under the direction of Dr. Alexander Jiménez, the USO will present Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), one of the most celebrated, massive, and orchestrally demanding tone poems by the late German Romantic composer, Richard Strauss. The new Steinway Hamburg D Concert Grand piano in Ruby Diamond Concert Hall, which received its inaugural performance on January 21, will also be featured in this concert as faculty pianist Ian Hobson joins the USO in a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Filled with numerous quotations from other pieces by Strauss, Ein Heldenleben (1898) has led critics and commentators to view this tone poem as autobiographical in nature for well over a century. While some have faulted the composer for his alleged hubris in composing such a huge piece of music about himself, others have argued that the work should be understood in broader terms, as the struggle of each individual to reconcile his or her inner and outer worlds.

Composed by Mozart in 1786, at the height of his popularity with the musical public in Vienna, this lyrical concerto is among the first of Mozart’s piano concertos to include parts for clarinets. Indeed, Mozart distinguished himself from his contemporaries as a concerto composer in part by the attention he gave to his writing for orchestral winds in his concertos. The Piano Concerto No. 23 was also one of twelve piano concertos that Mozart performed on his own Viennese concerts and that helped to establish the piano concerto as one of the most important and serious genres of classical music for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This performance is free and open to the public.