August 2009 Symphony Season - Program 1
Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - Festival Opening
Fond Memories from Vienna
Victor Yampolsky, conductor
J. Strauss: On the Beautiful Blue Danube
Schubert: Symphony #2 in B Flat Major D125
Brahms: Piano Concerto #1
Lilya Zilberstein, piano
Music Director Victor Yampolsky opens the Festival's 57th season with a unique twist on the classic concert program: overture, concerto, symphony. Instead of an overture, Johann Strauss, Jr's minature tone poem, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, which seems to have regrettably disappeared from symphony programs in recent years, serves as an apt evocation of the PMF setting with water and natural beauty. The first half concludes, not with a concerto, but with the rarely performed Second Symphony of Franz Schubert. Schubert was still a teenager when he composed this symphony, but it shows a remarkably well developed mastery of musical language. It is an extraordinarly difficult and virtuosic piece, especially for the violins.
After the intermission, instead of a symphony, a concerto that often sounds like a symphony and a favorite work of Maestro Yampolsky: The Brahms Piano Concerto #1. Brahms labored nearly a decade, in the beginning planning to write a symphony. Lilya Zilberstein, a PMF audience favorite, is returning to share her distinctive powerful sound which is particularly suited to this concerto. This is a particularly fitting collaboration for PMF, which has enjoyed memorable performances of this piece by John Browning in years past.
Hear Music Director Victor Yampolsky and Associate Conductor Stephen Alltop discuss this program and some historical aspects by clicking here.
Program Notes for this concert
This concert is sponsored by Bibs, Marge & Sarah