By Michael Pearl
The Pro Musica Youth Orchestra’s last concert of the season will be in the delightful open-air gardens of the Instituto Allende on Sunday, April 3, at 5 pm, with socially distanced seating (the clocks go forward that morning so it will still be light when the concert ends!). The orchestra, more than 40 strong, will perform works by Beethoven, Shostakovich, Schubert, and Rossini. This finale to the ensemble’s first season, under its new Music Director and Principal Conductor, Canadian Robert Mari, will be a fitting conclusion to a six-month session during which the musicians have gone from strength to strength and now play at an incredibly high standard. Those who attended their concert in December and heard them at our Gala Fundraiser in February can look forward to another wonderful afternoon of music-making.
The concert opens with one of the best-loved opera overtures of all time, from Rossini’s “William Tell,” his last opera. The opera itself is rarely performed these days, but the overture has been enduringly popular, and those of you of a certain age may well remember it as the theme tune to the long-running television series, “The Lone Ranger.” This will be followed by one of my favorite works, Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” (No. 8 in B Minor). It is very appropriate that we should be playing it this year, the bicentenary of its composition. It is sometimes called the “first Romantic symphony” because of its emphasis on the lyrical within the dramatic structure of classical sonata form, and there is no doubt that this is very dramatic music, which will have you on the edge of your seat.
After the intermission, we will hear Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 in C minor from “The Suite for Variety Orchestra.” It is one of the composer’s most famous works, written in 1938 for the newly founded Russian State Jazz Orchestra of Victor Knushevitsky. The score was lost during World War II but rediscovered in 1999 and premiered at a Promenade Concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2000. The evening concludes with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21. The work is clearly indebted to Beethoven’s predecessors, particularly his teacher Joseph Haydn as well as Mozart, but it is uniquely Beethoven’s work, notably the sudden shifts in tonal centers that were uncommon for traditional symphonic form and the prominent, more independent use of wind instruments.
It is rare to hear large-scale works in San Miguel with a full orchestra during these pandemic times, so don’t miss this opportunity to catch some of your favorite classical music. All tickets for the concert are 350 pesos donation each and are on sale through our website and at the concert 45 minutes before performance time. Details of all Pro Musica’s concerts and Patron Membership are on our website, www.promusicasma.org, or contact us at promusicasma@aol.com.
Pro Musica Concert Series
Pro Musica Youth Orchestra
Sun, Apr 3, 5pm
Instituto Allende Gardens
350 pesos, all tickets
www.promusicasma.org
