Friday, October 23, 2015
Repeats every day until Saturday, October 24, 2015 .
8:00PM on Friday and Saturday
Grand Rapids Symphony: Mahler’s Titan
CLASSICAL at DeVos Performance Hall
October 23/24, 8pm
JOHN HARBISON Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra)
Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5
MAHLER Symphony No. 1, “Titan”
Jahja Ling, Guest Conductor
Augustin Hadelich, Violin
The old English saying-‘start as you mean to continue’ was never better applied than to Mahler’s First Symphony. All the hallmarks of greatness are there from the beginning-a love of depicting nature in music, a sweet nostalgia for a world fast disappearing, a passion for squeezing a whole world into an hour of music, and most of all a genius for creating a sense of exaltation at journey’s end. Throughout his painfully short life (Mahler died at fifty-one) Mahler created nearly a dozen symphonic masterworks spanning the huge range of human emotion and experience and it all begins here, with strings that herald a hazy, hot summer’s morning, to a rollicking Austrian peasant dance leading to a finale that will leave you cheering. Setting the scene for Mahler’s epic is the final concerto for violin by Mozart, most probably written for his own gifts as a performer and another work that yearns for times gone by, John Harbison’s evocation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s roaring twenties here, Jay Gatsby.
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