Symphony brings Vienna to Spokane
Vienna thinks of itself as the capital city of classical music. What other city can claim such a string of famous names as residents?
From Mozart to Mahler and beyond, the Austrian capital has attracted the great names of classical music like a magnet.
The Spokane Symphony pays tribute to “Vienna – City of My Dreams” at its first Casual Classics at The Met concerts this weekend.
Music Director Eckart Preu has programmed works by five of Vienna’s most famous classical masters: Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Mahler and Schoenberg.
“Without Vienna, music history wouldn’t be the same,” Preu says. “What happened over the centuries in just this city makes one’s head spin.”
Haydn came to Vienna as a boy to sing in the choir of the Imperial Chapel (now known as the Vienna Choir Boys). Mozart could not wait to leave Salzburg to live in Vienna with its famous Imperial Opera house.
Beethoven came to study with Mozart and Haydn. Schubert and Schoenberg were born there. Mahler’s greatest triumphs (and some of his greatest sorrows) happened there when he conducted the Imperial Opera.
The classical style jelled in the First Viennese School of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and exploded into 20th-century modernism just before World War I.
Saturday’s and Sunday’s concerts will feature a quartet made up four principal players from the orchestra’s string section: violinists William Harvey (the orchestra’s interim concertmaster) and Jason Bell, violist Nicholas Carper and cellist John Marshall.
They will play the solo part of Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, “freely transcribed” in 1932 from a 18th-century concerto grosso by Handel (a composer who did not live in Vienna).
Harvey graduated earlier this year from New York’s Juilliard School of Music, where he was the recipient of the school’s William Schuman Prize. He served as concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra and has been soloist with the Indianapolis Symphony and the New World Youth Orchestra.
He joined the symphony in September to fill the position vacated at the end of last season with the retirement of Kelly Farris, the orchestra’s longtime concertmaster.
Although the orchestra will continue to audition other concertmaster candidates, Preu calls Harvey “an exciting and highly qualified musician with a rich musical background. He will be with us throughout the year.”
This weekend’s program also includes Gustav Mahler’s orchestration of the second movement of Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. The work’s nickname comes from second movement’s variations on the song of the same name Schubert had written years earlier.
The concerts begin with Mozart’s Overture to “La Clemenza di Tito” and close with Haydn’s Symphony No. 88.
Preu will introduce the works on each concert with verbal program notes and anecdotes.
The symphony has made a change in the Met series this year. The concerts will be given on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons, rather than the Sunday-Tuesday combinations of past seasons.