This Week in Classical Music

by: Randy Kinkel

March 08, 2009

Beethoven Premiere in Chicago

This Week in Classical Music-March 8, 2009

( Phoenix, AZ )
•Beethoven Premiere in Chicago
•DC Philharmonic is born

This Week in Classical Music 3/08/09

It’s This Week in Classical Music – a look at what’s happening in the classical music world—I’m Randy Kinkel.

A Beethoven Premiere took place last week in Chicago. A piece written 216 years ago and apparently never performed in public until last Sunday got a hearing as part of the International Beethoven Project. It was Beethoven’s 1805 piano trio Hess #47, a re-working of an earlier string trio the composer had written 13 years before, in 1792. Beethoven finished only the first movement and 43 measures of the second before stopping work on the piece. Violinist Sang Mee Lee and Cellist Wendy Warner joined Pianist George LePauw for the premiere. The concert also included the North American Premieres of two other Beethoven works, trios for violin, cello and piano, one in D major (anhang 3) and one in E flat (numbered opus 63 in the composer’s catalogue).

There’s a new orchestra in the nation’s capital—The DC Philharmonic held a news conference recently to announce it’s first couple of concerts in April at the Music Center at Strathmore—to include Torke’s “Bright Blue Music”, Barber’s “Knoxville, Summer of 1915” and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony with Denyce graves and Harolyn Blackwell as soloists. 30-year-old conductor and founder John Baltimore says by targeting the African American market, the orchestra will be able to self-support and reject the standard non-profit model. Says Baltimore, “I believe wholeheartedly that Washington in particular has this unique demographic of educated, upper-class, recession-proof government wage-earners that, if this music was marketed to them and they could see that this music is for them, they would be supportive of it."

For more information on these and other items and events, go to the KBAQ website at KBAQ-dot-org.… be listening every week at this time for another update, and join me at noon every weekday for the Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries, … I’m Randy Kinkel, for KBAQ’s “This week in Classical Music”… on 89-five KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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