The Salina Symphony will kick off the new year with a concert of uplifting music and exuberant rhythms that includes one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular symphonies, an avant-garde work performed by a world-renowned cellist, and the unveiling of a new composition by Symphony conductor and music director Yaniv Segal.
“I like to present a variety of music at a concert, similar to a well balance meal,” Segal said. “This concert will include my brand of contemporary music, a jazz/rock piece, and a symphony by one of classical music’s greatest composers.”
Segal’s new piece, “…the light that breathes…,” will kick off the Symphony’s “Rocking Tchaikovsky” concert, which begins at 4 p.m. on Sun., Jan. 12, at the Stiefel Theatre for the Performing Arts, 151 S. Santa Fe.
The concert also will feature guest soloist Mark Kosower, principal cellist of The Cleveland Orchestra and a world-renowned recitalist, and the monumental Fifth Symphony of the great Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Segal said his composition explores “the nature of absorption, relay and eventual bloom” using the concept of the cotyledon (an embryonic leaf in some plants that fuels the plant’s growth and then disappears into the plant).
“It gets energy from sunlight and turns that energy into a breathing organism, which also allows all other life on Earth to breathe,” he said. “This concept inspired me to write this music.”
Segal said the piece begins with textures and hidden melodies, as if searching for the path forward, then grows as information and energy is encoded and transferred from one generation (or cell) to the next. As the work continues, “we hear the peeling back of layers as each new growth subsumes the previous iteration.”
Segal’s work utilizes the full orchestra plus extra players situated around the theater ringing bells, along with extra trumpets and horns to “help create this 3D effect of life and sound around us,” he said.
“(It) ends in a glorious celebration of light and life,” he said. “I’m grateful to be given the opportunity to write something new (for the Salina Symphony). The blank canvas you get to use here is rare.”
Cello concerto
Following Segal’s piece, Kosower will perform Austrian composer and pianist Friedrich Gulda’s “Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra,” a wild and catchy composition described by the late composer as a combination of “jazz, a minuet, rock, a smidgen of polka, a march and a cadenza with two spots where a star cellist must improvise.”
“It’s a fascinating piece, kind of a spoof in the way that it foreshadowed crossover music by alternating between genres like rock, jazz, American folk music and Oktoberfest polka,” Kosower said. “It’s lighthearted and fun, but (Gulda) was a pretty serious artist, too. He seamlessly flows from one genre to another as if it’s the natural thing to do. There’s real substance to the music.”
A particular challenge of performing Gulda’s work, Kosower said, are two sections in the third movement where the soloist is required to improvise on the cello.
“Improvisation was something Gulda valued on the piano,” Kosower said. “There are things I can improvise, but I’m a composer too, so I composed an outline of what I can do during both sections. It’s improvised, but I have a road map as well.”
Kosower has been principal cello for The Cleveland Orchestra since 2010. Described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as a “virtuoso of staggering prowess,” Kosower has performed throughout the world as a recitalist, concerto soloist and chamber musician.
Alongside solo performances with The Cleveland Orchestra, Kosower has appeared with symphony orchestras in Detroit, Houston, Minnesota, Oregon, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Phoenix and Seattle, as well as international orchestras such as the Hong Kong Philharmonic, China National Symphony, National Symphony of Taiwan and Orchestre de Paris.
He also has served on the faculties of the Cleveland Institute of Music and San Francisco Conservatory of Music, as well as Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the United States, Colorado College’s Summer Music Festival and California’s Hidden Valley Music Seminars.
Performing with local orchestras is one of Kosower’s great pleasures, and he knows he’ll be in good hands with Segal, whom he’s known for nearly a decade.
“He’s a very talented conductor and composer himself,” Kosower said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s done with this orchestra.”
Victory over strife
The second half of the concert will feature Tchaikovsky’s classic Fifth Symphony, a work which has been described as “the ultimate picture of victory over strife.”
The epic work, which was composed in 1888 and first performed in St. Petersburg with Tchaikovsky conducting, is in four movements with a recurring main theme used as a device to unify each movement. Sometimes dubbed the “fate theme,” it has a funeral character in the first movement but gradually transforms into a triumphant march that dominates the final movement.
“The idea of fate coming back in every movement in a different guise makes it a journey unto itself,” Segal said.
The perfectionistic and often depressed Tchaikovsky considered the Fifth Symphony a failure, but it grew into one of the composer’s most popular works, the second movement in particular with its memorable melody for solo horn.
When Tchaikovsky wrote his Fifth Symphony, he thought he had no more good ideas left in him and that fate had doomed it to failure, Segal said.
“He thought that whenever you did something successful, fate grabs you and brings you down,” Segal said. “But the last internation of the work is 100 percent positive, because it took so much for him to get to. It’s such an exciting, beautiful work that nothing can follow it, and that’s why it ends the concert.”
Concert tickets
Tickets for Rocking Tchaikovsky start at $42 ($25 for students) and may be purchased at the Stiefel Theatre box office, by calling 785-823-1998 or at www.salinasymphony.org.
A pre-concert talk with Segal will begin at 3 p.m. Please enter through the main Stiefel Theatre doors, which open at 2:45 p.m.
For more information, contact Adrienne Allen at 785-823-8309 or visit salinasymphony.org.
