The Duke Symphony Orchestra
Harry Davidson, music director

http://music.duke.edu...

Free Admission

Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Concert begins at 8:00 p.m.
Baldwin Auditorium
East Campus, Duke University, Durham

This concert is a special program in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth. The composer’s lovely “Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64,” will be performed on the same program with a reconstruction of the unfinished work, “Piano Concerto No. 3 in E minor” which inspired the violin piece.

(Read a news article below that describes the interesting relationship between the famous violin concerto and the abandoned piano concerto which has been reconstructed by Duke music professor R. Larry Todd *)

A celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Felix Mendelssohn's birth
Happy Birthday Felix Mendelssohn! (1809-1847)

All Mendelssohn Program:

• Trumpet Overture, Op. 101
  
• Piano Concerto No. 3 in E minor with soloist CICILIA YUDHA
  (reconstruction by Duke professor R. Larry Todd)
  
• Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave), Op. 26
  
• Concerto in E minor for Violin, Op. 64 with soloist ERIC PRITCHARD
  

Please plan on arriving between 7:30 and 7:45 p.m. We'll start gathering at 7:30 p.m. in the lobby of Baldwin auditorium. You can identify me by a clipboard with a notebook-size colorful meetup sign (containing the ubiquitous red meetup.com icon). If you arrive after 7:50 you can find us in the front row of the auditorium where we've been sitting for the past few concerts. The concert starts at 8:00 p.m.

This event is being cross-posted with TMAC: Triangle Museum, Arts & Culture meetup group, and we will be gathering with them in the lobby of Baldwin Auditorium before finding a place to sit.

The Duke Symphony concerts are wonderful programs and they are very well-attended by the community. This will be an especially anticipated concert for classical music fans as it includes the well-known Mendelssohn Violin concerto, as well as the reconstruction of an unfinished Mendelssohn piano concerto* for which R. Larry Todd orchestrated the first two movements of the piano concerto, and created a third movement by incorporating the final movement of the violin concerto, transcribing the solo violin part for piano.

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* Following here is an article about the reconstruction of the Mendelssohn piano concerto by R. Larry Todd found on the web at:
http://www.dukenews.d...

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The Evolution of Musical Genius
By Elizabeth Thompson

The Duke Symphony Orchestra presents Mendelssohn's music

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke music professor R. Larry Todd wants to change minds about classical music.

“We have an idea of classical music as ossified, set in stone from the moment it is composed,” says Todd, a leading scholar of the works of German composer Felix Mendelssohn. “The composers themselves had a different idea. They saw their works as constantly evolving, always subject to revision as new ideas emerged. It’s an opposite view from the way most people today think about classical music.”

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, the Duke Symphony Orchestra, directed by Harry Davidson, presents a special program in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth. The composer’s “Violin Concerto in e minor, Op. 64,” will be performed on the same program with Todd’s reconstruction of the unfinished work, “Piano Concerto No. 3 in e minor,” which inspired the violin piece.

“Mendelssohn never finished 80 percent of the compositions he began,” says Todd. “The ‘Piano Concerto No. 3’ is among these fragments. Mendelssohn made sketches for the first two movements, but never orchestrated them and never wrote the final, third movement. I always wondered why he abandoned this work, and I found the answer when I realized his sketches dated from the same period as the ‘Violin Concerto in e minor.’ The keys are the same and there are many thematic similarities. Even though he abandoned the piano concerto, he incorporated many of its ideas into his famous violin concerto.”

Interested in exploring the relationship between the works, Todd orchestrated the first two movements of the piano concerto. Lacking a third movement, he decided to incorporate the final movement of the violin concerto, transcribing the solo violin part for piano.

Todd’s reconstruction premiered in Bavaria in January, and a recording by Matthias Kirschnereit was released on Sony’s Arte Nova label last spring.

“This project is my playful attempt, as a musicologist, to shed some light on the creative process,” says Todd. “I hope the students of the Duke Symphony Orchestra will be interested to hear the similarities between these works and see where some of the ideas in the violin concerto came from and how they evolved.”

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