Western Music Concert September 13, 2008

Our opening concert explores the extraordinary variety of musical moods that an orchestra is able to portray, setting the scene for a season of many contrasts and colors, with music that takes us from delicate wit to anguished emotion and exhilarating triumph. Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave whisks us away to the remote reaches of Scotland, which inspired this tone poem depicting the sweeping majesty of the natural world. The season’s first celebrity to take the stage of the JBT is one of the world’s leading woodwind soloists, Malcolm Messier, who plays Mozart’s life-enhancing and virtuosic showpiece for oboe, a delightful work which cannot fail to lift the spirits. The concert concludes with one of the great musical utterances of the Romantic era, Brahms’s First Symphony. This is the work that established Brahms as the inheritor of the mantle of Beethoven Claus von Bulow called it Beethoven’s Tenth . The symphony’s emotional breadth, intellectual depth and dignity mark it out as one of the most important artistic achievements of the era. Zane Dalal, the SOI’s talented and versatile Assistant Conductor, takes his place on the podium. Contact: 66223737.