Concert IV "Toast of the Town"
2022-23 Season - Concert IV - Toast of the Town
5:30pm - Online Waiting Room Opens
6:00pm - 6:30pm: Pre-concert Conversations
Nik's "Happy Hour" Chat
Music Notes with WVSO’s Music Director & Conductor, Dr. Nikolas Caoile
7:00pm - Concert Downbeat
Program
Quinn Mason
"Toast of the Town"
Quinn Mason: Toast of the Town. Quinn Mason (b. 1996) is a composer and conductor based in Dallas, Texas. He is one of the most sought-after young composers in the country. His orchestral and chamber music has been performed in concert by orchestras and chamber ensembles throughout the United States and Canada. A multiple prize winner in composition, he has received numerous awards and honors.
“My mission is to compose music for various mediums “based in traditional western art music and reflecting the times in which we currently live.Toast of the Town is a festive and fun overture to an operetta that doesn't exist. It is designed in the style of light operetta, comparable to Gilbert and Sullivan or Offenbach overtures.”
Camille Saint-Saëns
La muse et le poète
Vanessa Moss (Violin) and Brooke Scholl (cello)
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. A musical prodigy, he made his concert debut at the age of ten.After studying at the Paris Conservatoire Saint-Saëns followed a conventional career as a church organist for nearly 20 years, later becoming a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas. Vanessa Moss (violin) and Brooke Scholl (cello) join the WVSO to perform Saint-Saëns’ La muse et le poète, “a duo concertante for violin, cello and orchestra. It is late Saint-Saëns, composed when he was in Luxor, Egypt, in 1909. Despite its title, there is no explicit literary program, though the rhapsodic violin acts as the muse to the cello's more earthbound poet, and gradually persuades it into its own flights of fancy.” (Andrew Clements – The Guardian).
INTERMISSION
Antonín Leopold Dvořák
Symphony No. 9 in E-minor From the New World
Antonín Leopold Dvořák (1841 – 1904) was a Czech composer, one of the first to achieve worldwide recognition. Dvořák displayed his musical gifts at an early age, being an apt violin student from age six. Following the Romantic-era nationalist example of his predecessor Bedřich Smetana, Dvořák frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. The Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World, popularly known as the New World Symphony, was composed in 1893 while Dvořák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. It premiered in New York City on 16 December 1893 and is one of the most popular of all symphonies. Astronaut Neil Armstrong took a tape recording of the New World Symphony along during the Apollo 11 mission, the first Moon landing, in 1969.