Latest news with #SymphonyNo.5
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Free Alabama Symphony Orchestra concerts returning to Railroad Park for Memorial Day weekend
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — The Alabama Symphony Orchestra's 'Symphony in the Summer' series is returning to Railroad Park this weekend. This series will offer three nights of free performances from Friday-Sunday. Each concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. 'Symphony in the Summer is our gift to the city,' Mark Patrick, President of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, said in a statement. 'Each performance explores a fresh perspective of the depth of orchestral music. Audiences have an opportunity to enjoy pieces ranging from symphonic classics to patriotic favorites and even tunes from movies and Broadway shows including 'Wicked.'' The Alabama Symphony Orchestra has offered free summer concerts for more than 40 years, and since 20011, those concerts have been held at Railroad Park. Here's the lineup for this weekend's performances: Friday, May 23 – Carlos Izcaray, conductor Izcaray — Puebla Tchaikovsky — Suite from Sleeping Beauty Beethoven — Symphony No. 5 Saturday, May 24 – Daniel Cho, conductor Humperdinck — Prelude to Hansel and Gretel Coleridge –Taylor – Petite suite de Concert Dvorak – Symphony No.7 Sunday, May 25 – Chris Confessore, conductor Smith — The Star-Spangled Banner Lowden — Armed Forces Salute Ward — America the Beautiful Williams — Superman March Berlin — Irving Berlin: A Symphonic Portrait Menken — Overture to Beauty and the Beast Powell — How to Train your Dragon Newley — 'Pure Imagination' from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Menken – 'Out There' from The Hunchback of Notre Dame Schwartz — Highlights from Wicked arr. Waldin — Abba Medley More information can be found on Alabama Symphony Orchestra's website or social media pages. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
News in brief
KSP identifies man fatally struck on I-64 ASHLAND — Kentucky State Police are investigating after a man was fatally struck near the 185-mile marker of Interstate 64 at about 9:30 p.m. Saturday. The incident occurred in the westbound lane, according to a news release from KSP Post 14. KSP troopers responding to the report of a collision located a deceased man, identified Sunday evening as Hubert E. Mosby, 78, lying on the shoulder of the road near his vehicle. Mosby was believed to have been tending to a mechanical issue with his vehicle when he was struck by an unknown vehicle that fled the scene, according to the release. The incident remains under investigation by KSP Detective Nathan Carter. Anyone with information is urged to call him at 606-928-6421. Hanging Rock church to mark 62nd anniversary IRONTON — The Hanging Rock Church of Jesus Christ, led by Bishop Glenn Jenkins, will celebrate its 62nd anniversary with a special service at 6 p.m. Saturday, April 5. The church is at 525 State Route 650 in Ironton. OU Symphony Orchestra to perform at OUS IRONTON — The Ohio University Symphony Orchestra will perform the final concert of the Ironton Council for the Arts 2024-25 subscription concert series this weekend. Directed by Dr. Jose Rocha, who is also director of orchestral activities in the Ohio University School of Music, the concert will take place at 3 p.m. Saturday, April 5, in the Ohio University Southern Riffe Rotunda, at 1804 Liberty Ave. in Ironton. The rotunda is handicap accessible. The orchestra will perform 'Karelia Overture' by Jean Sibelius, 'In the Steppes of Central Asia' by Alexander Borodin and 'Symphony No. 5' by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Tickets are $15 in cash or by check payable to the 'Ironton Council for the Arts,' and students of all ages and children are admitted free of charge. In addition to its own concert series, the Symphony Orchestra collaborates in performances with choral ensembles, Opera Theater and the Performing Arts Series.
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why a Percussionist Was Playing a Siren
Good morning. It's Friday. We'll find out what happened when an experienced percussionist rehearsed with a siren at the New York Philharmonic. We'll also get details on a 30-day reprieve from the Trump administration on congestion pricing. Joseph Kelly's first rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic went well. He felt he was 'getting familiar' with the instrument he was playing in his spot behind the trombone section — an instrument he had not played before. In the second rehearsal, he said, 'I felt like my approach was coming together.' Then he broke the instrument. The instrument was an air raid siren. Kelly was one of 12 percussionists who had parts in 'Amériques,' a dissonant piece that the composer Edgard Varèse began writing in 1918, a couple of years after Varèse moved to Brooklyn from Paris. As the critic Harold C. Schonberg observed when the Philharmonic played it in 1975, 'it calls for unconventional instruments and makes unconventional sound.' It also calls for an unconventionally sized orchestra. The version of the piece that the Philharmonic played squeezed 122 musicians, 53 more than were needed for Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 last season. Only two of the 12 percussionists in the Varèse were full-time members of the orchestra. Kelly, who is the assistant principal timpanist and a section percussionist with the Toronto Symphony, and the other nine were hired as 'extra musicians' to fill out the unusually large percussion section in 'Amériques.' Varèse wrote parts for castanets, sleigh bells, whips and even a drumlike instrument called a lion's roar. 'I think that was him experiencing the city' when he was still a new New Yorker, Kelly said. The sound of sirens is 'so much a part of being in New York that you almost don't notice it' after a while, said Kelly, who graduated from the Manhattan School of Music and lived in Manhattan for seven years before moving to Chicago, Miami and then Toronto. The note in the Philharmonic program book said that some listeners had 'latched on to' the siren 'and decided that 'Amériques' depicted a bustling modern American city.' Varèse, though, called 'Amériques' 'a piece of absolute music, completely unrelated to the noises of modern life.' But was it? He also said that 'Amériques' was 'my own rather vivid reaction to life as I know it.' Unlike a violinist or a cellist who carries his own instrument wherever he plays, Kelly did not bring any sirens on the plane to New York. The Philharmonic has several, and when he tried them out, a military-green one caught his ear. 'I liked that one in particular because I was able to start and stop it very comfortably and control the dynamics more clearly' — all elements that mattered in 'Amériques' because Varèse wrote instructions in the score for 'when to rise and fall, how loud to play and when to cut off,' he said. The instrument had been modified to start and stop with a handle. During the second rehearsal, the pin that connected the gears to the handle broke. 'I stopped too suddenly,' Kelly said. The gears no longer whirled, and the siren no longer whirred. Kelly lugged the object backstage and, with the production crew, took it apart. 'It looked like we were performing surgery,' he said. 'It's at least from the '40s. This is from an age when things were built to be repaired — not like now, when something breaks and you throw it out and get a new one.' The broken pin was stuck, so someone carried the parts to the machine shop at the Metropolitan Opera, just across the plaza at Lincoln Center. But the pin could not be salvaged, and a replacement pin was nowhere to be found. So Kelly tried other sirens in the Philharmonic's collection. 'It's the New York Philharmonic,' he said. 'They had four other sirens.' He ended up using two red sirens, one hand-held and one mounted on a table. 'They cut through the orchestra more easily than the original one,' he said, and that 'served the music better.' Early showers and cloudy skies should give way to sunshine by noon. Expect gusty breezes up to 39 miles per hour and high temperatures in the low 50s. Both the wind and the temperatures will fall off overnight, with a low around 42. In effect until March 31 (Eid al-Fitr). The latest New York news Trump official delays congestion pricing deadline New York was defiant when the Trump administration demanded that congestion pricing end by today. Now Washington is willing to wait a month. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, extended the deadline by 30 days. But the reprieve came with a threat: 'Continued noncompliance will not be taken lightly,' he said in a social media post that was directed at Gov. Kathy Hochul. He called congestion pricing 'unlawful' and said that the federal government and President Trump were 'putting New York on notice.' 'Your refusal to end cordon pricing' — as congestion pricing is sometimes called — 'and your open disrespect towards the federal government is unacceptable,' he said. It was yet another twist in the fight between the administration and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the program. A spokesman for Hochul said that Duffy's post 'doesn't change what Governor Hochul has been saying all along: The cameras are staying on.' The M.T.A. took the Trump administration to court last month, arguing that the administration could not reverse a program that had been approved. That approval came in the last two months of the Biden administration. Duffy's announcement about the extended deadline came two days after he sent a letter to the M.T.A. in which he threatened to withhold federal money from the authority if it did not respond to questions about crime on the subway, which he characterized as out of control. Crime on the subway has, in fact, been declining. Duffy's letter made no mention of congestion pricing, but some transportation specialists and legal experts suggested that the missive was a thinly veiled effort to gain leverage over the M.T.A. Trump has promised to end congestion pricing and could use a range of tactics to get his way, legal experts said. Most passenger cars are charged $9 during peak hours when they drive into the 'congestion relief zone,' which is anywhere in Manhattan south of 60th Street. The tolls are discounted by 75 percent overnight. Seeing Stars Dear Diary: It was 1985, and my husband and I were living on the Upper East Side. We planned a rare date night out and found a friend to babysit our 1-year-old daughter. We set out for a nearby theater where 'Cocoon,' with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn among the stars, was playing. I was a fan of the couple, having seen them onstage at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis when I was growing up in Iowa. Unfortunately, when we got to the theater, we found that the next showing was sold out. Determined not to waste the evening, we walked a few blocks to another theater, where 'Prizzi's Honor,' with Kathleen Turner, Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, was about to start. As we waited to buy tickets, I noticed an older couple standing a few feet ahead of us in line. I nudged my husband. 'Look,' I whispered. 'That couple: That's Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn!' — Jean Young Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Brandon Thorp, Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@ Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
For Cleveland Orchestra, It's Beethoven (and Freedom) to the Rescue
The Cleveland Orchestra showed up at Carnegie Hall this week without a star. When the music director Franz Welser-Möst planned the ensemble's two-night visit to New York, the opening concert, on Tuesday, was to be headlined by the soprano Asmik Grigorian. A volcanic presence on European stages who rarely makes it to the United States, Grigorian would have been a major box-office draw. Then came news that she was pulling out for unspecified personal reasons. Time to break out the emergency rations of Beethoven. The remaining rump of the Clevelanders' program for Tuesday, the Suite from Janacek's 'From the House of the Dead,' based on Dostoyevsky's account of life in a Russian prison colony, was joined by Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and, for good measure, his 'Leonore' Overture No. 3. A crowd-pleasing solution to a marketing headache? A repertory staple musicians can shine in without too much rehearsal? Not at all. The new program was 'a chance to say something important about our world today,' Welser-Möst wrote in a program statement that referred, smartly but vaguely, to people's 'fight for freedom everywhere.' Without naming specifics, Welser-Möst explained that the Janacek was a testament to 'human dignity' in 'desolate circumstances.' Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 traced a progression 'from darkness to light,' he added, while the overture, written for Beethoven's political prison break opera 'Fidelio,' represented the 'greatest music about freedom ever written.' Far from being a stop gap, the new program created what Welser-Möst called 'a profound statement' that was sure to 'resonate deeply' with New Yorkers. (No similar claims were made for Wednesday's program, which consisted of Stravinsky's 'Pétrouchka' and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5.) The resulting concert on Tuesday was invigorating and full of ravishing playing, as was the performance the next night. But if there was any profound truth to be gleaned from the double helping of Beethoven served alongside Janacek's dazzling suite, it was only that the Fifth and the 'Leonore' overture provide ready-made templates for struggle narratives ending in triumph. Just whose struggle and what is being overcome — I'm guessing that Gaza, Ukraine and the state of American democracy are among them — remain open to interpretation. In fairness, the Cleveland Orchestra has never relied on provocative or politically minded programming to earn its devoted fan base and superlative-studded reviews. In his 23 years at the helm, Welser-Möst has fine-tuned this storied ensemble into an elegant, cohesive and keenly responsive engine. Other American orchestras have struggled to define their role in society as they fret over accusations that their branch of the arts is reactionary and socially irrelevant. The Cleveland Orchestra's image may be conservative — a guardian of a particular European tradition — but it's a well-defined luxury brand that delivers outstanding value. Watching the musicians perform on the same stage that had just hosted the Vienna Philharmonic, I was struck by the similarities between the two institutions. Some of it had to do with the Cleveland Orchestra's mellow and thoughtfully blended brass section, which stands apart from the more metallic and muscular playing in most American orchestras. The Cleveland string section physically moves much like its Austrian counterpart, with entire blocks of players bobbing and weaving as in a chamber setting where the whole torso helps signal expressive intent to the group. Especially in the last movement of the Tchaikovsky, it was a pleasure watching the violinists sway and dance as a bloc. And though the ensemble is studded with stars, a spirit of collaborative forbearance infuses solos. The guest concertmaster Jan Mracek was almost self-effacingly light-footed in the virtuosic cadenzas Janacek writes for the solo violin. John Clouser's bassoon simmered with refinement, especially in the Tchaikovsky. And my ear kept being drawn to the uncommonly dark-hued sound of Joshua Smith's flute, which lent unexpected gravitas to an instrument that typically provides light birdlike relief whenever it rises above the orchestral texture. From the podium, Welser-Möst projected discreet authority, conducting with an economy of gesture that highlighted the easy symbiosis between him and the orchestra. In the Beethoven symphony, he was especially attentive to transitional moments, including the exponential crescendo that flares up at the end of the third movement and leads into the explosive final Allegro. Beethoven demands utmost restraint from the orchestra in the bars leading up to that surge, as the music rises in pitch without yet gaining volume. At Carnegie Hall, that passage came across as almost claustrophobically repressive, the eventual uncorking of sound and energy seeming to burst out like pent-up frustration. It was one of those musical thrills that might have made Beethoven's Fifth such a safe bet with audiences of all kinds. But to a politically inclined listener, it could also sound like a tipping point in a mass movement leading to revolution.
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 to be performed in Minchinhampton church
THE Thames Head Singers and Capriol Chamber Orchestra are set to perform in Minchinhampton. The concert, featuring Cherubini's Requiem in C Minor and Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, will take place at Holy Trinity Church on Saturday, April 5. Doors open at 6.45pm, with the performance starting at 7.30pm. Carers and those aged 18 and under can attend for free. Tickets can be booked online, and are priced at up to £18. Over 50 tickets are available.
