Orchestra at Maryville College invites patrons ‘Around the World’ for spring concert
For its spring production, the Orchestra at Maryville College is inviting classical music enthusiasts to take a trip “Around the World” without ever leaving their seats at the Clayton Center for the Arts on April 25.
“‘Around the World’ is literally that — a concert where all of the music is from different parts of the world, and each piece really sounds distinctive of those regions,” said Dr. Eric Simpson, conductor of the ensemble and associate professor of music at Maryville College. “Sometimes music has a title evocative of a foreign locale but still sounds very much like Western art music, but that’s not the case here.”
The concert is one of the three public performances held each year by the Orchestra at Maryville College, which was first established in 1916 as the College Orchestra. For several decades, it was known as the Maryville Little Symphony Orchestra, and in the late 1960s, it grew to include community members as well as MC students.
For the April 25 program, selections will include works by Saint-saens (France), Granados (Spain), Wood (the United Kingdom), Stephen Sondheim (the United States) and two additional pieces that Simpson is looking forward to presenting to those in attendance.
“We’re playing the Overture to ‘Tsar Boris’ by Russian composer Vasily Kalinnikov, who’s somewhat similar to Gershwin, in that he died in his early 30s and doesn’t have a tremendous amount of material,” Simpson said. “It’s a piece about a 16th century Russian czar, and it has these Russian folk melodies in it with a lot of moving notes and fast tempos, which makes it a challenge for the violins to get up and down the fingerboard quickly, while it also challenges the brass to be really loud and dark.”
Another selection, he added, evokes the solitude and natural beauty of Scandinavia. The Fourth Movement of Sibelius’ Second Symphony, Simpson said, is another piece that will give players in the ensemble a musical workout.
“It sounds so Finnish, so frozen, that for part of it you think, ‘I must be on a glacier right now,’ because it sounds that way,” Simpson said. “It’s difficult for an ensemble to evoke the feeling of being alone in this frozen environment, so there’s a lot of repetition of musical ideas, which can be taxing, but in a way, it hypnotizes the audience with that feeling.
“It’s tricky, but it sounds very Finnish, the same way that other parts of the program sound very Russian, or very French, or very Spanish. It’s that sort of concert — a neat amount of variety and very regionally specific pieces.”
The Orchestra at Maryville College will perform “Around the World” at 7 p.m. April 25 in the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre of the Clayton Center for the Arts. Admission is $5 for adults, seniors and area students. Admission is free for College students, faculty and staff.
For more information, call the Clayton Center box office at 865-981-8590.