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Posted: 11/13/14

Second Performance in Laredo Phil’s Concert Season Sunday

 

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The Laredo Phil returns to Laredo Community College’s Guadalupe and Lilia Martínez Fine Arts Center theater Sunday, November 16 at 3 p.m. with the second in its Masterworks Season concerts.

Tickets cost $20 for adults and $15 for seniors and are on sale via the Laredo Phil’s website, www.laredophil.com. For more information, call 956.326.3039.

This concert focuses on the brilliance of Mozart and the dark richness of the Romantic German composer Gustav Mahler, said music director and Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) assistant professor Brendan Townsend.

“Opening the concert will be In Good King Charles’s Golden Days by Iowan composer Linda Robbins Coleman. This piece was commissioned as an overture to George Bernard Shaw’s 1939 masterpiece. I love Linda’s setting of the vivacious verbal by-play in Shaw’s work,” Townsend said, “She brilliantly captures the fun of the play in her short overture.”

Mozart’s final symphony, subtitled Jupiter, fills out the first half of the concert.

“This final symphony is by far the hardest to play and make it understandable for the audience,” said Dr. Yu Mei Huang, Laredo Phil concertmaster and TAMIU associate professor.

Townsend agreed, adding that the challenge is to bring together the vast number of ideas that Mozart included in the final movement to light, individually and collectively.

The second half of the program will be a much lighter affair, opening with the well-known Radetzky March by Johann Strauss. This piece is always played as the final encore of the New Year’s Day concert from the Vienna Philharmonic.

A dark and lush tone marks the quiet and intense mood in the slow movement of Mahler’s 5th Symphony. It is often extracted and performed alone.

“For complex reasons, we had to switch around some programming,” said Townsend, “…but I knew that there are some big Mahler fans who were hoping to hear the 4th Symphony on this concert, so I had to reward them with this Mahler token.”

The Mahler 4th Symphony will now be performed by the Laredo Phil on March 28, 2015.

The final work will be the brilliantly colorful Capriccio Espagnol by Rimsky-Korsakov.

For more Laredo Phil information, visit their web site or call 956.326.3039.


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