Programme:
Johannes Brahms – “Academic Festival” Overture, Op.80
Jean Sibelius – Karelia suite, Op.11
Franz Schubert – Symphony No.8 “Unfinished” in B minor, D 759
Dmitri Shostakovich – Waltz No.2 from the “Suite for Variety Orchestra”

Conductor: Chris Morgan

Leader: Hywel Webley

Academic Festival Overture Op.80 by Johannes Brahms is one of a pair of contrasting concert overtures — the other being the Tragic Overture Op.81. Brahms composed the work during the summer of 1880 as a tribute to the University of Breslau, which had notified him that it would award him an honorary doctorate in music. In a grand gesture of gratitude, Brahms created a work that sparkles with some of the finest virtues of his orchestral technique.

Karelia Suite Op.11 is a subset of pieces from the longer Karelia Music (named after the Finnish region of Karelia) written by Jean Sibelius in 1893 for the Viipuri Students’ Association and premiered, with Sibelius conducting, at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki, Grand Duchy of Finland, on 23 November of that year. Sibelius first conducted the shorter Suite ten days later; it remains one of his most popular works.

In 1823, the Graz Music Society gave Franz Schubert an honorary diploma. He felt obliged to dedicate a symphony to them in return and intended to complete an orchestral score he had started in 1822 consisting of two completed movements plus at least the first two pages of the start of a scherzo. To this day, musicologists still disagree as to why Schubert failed to complete the symphony, even though he lived for another six years. The symphony was premiered in December 1865 in Vienna, long after Schubert’s death, and was received with great enthusiasm – reviews declared that the music was among Schubert’s most beautiful.

The Suite for Variety Orchestra No.1 includes arrangements of excerpts from Shostakovich’s ballet, theatre, and film music. It is believed to have been composed after 1956 in collaboration with close friend and arranger Levon Atovmyan. The “Waltz II” movement from the suite is an arrangement of cues composed for the soundtrack to the 1955 Soviet war romance film “The First Echelon”. In 1994 Philips issued a single of the “Waltz II” performed by André Rieu and his orchestra. It reached Number 5 in the Dutch Mega Top 50 and sold over 50,000 copies.

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Adult £10
Concessions £5 (full time students / income support / disability benefit only)
Under 19 £2
Under 5 free

This concert is generously sponsored by Natural Generation – Solar Energy for the Future