This year's Symphony of the Canyons season is designed as a crescendo, both musically and historically. Beginning with music of Haydn, the father of the symphony, the concerts will proceed through the growth of the form until we cap off the year with the music of Gustav Mahler, whose ultra-romantic visions provided a logical conclusion to the century's growth and launched the wild, unrestricted approaches of our own age.
For each concert, music director Robert Lawson has chosen a thematic grouping to tie the works together. In the first offering, for example, a symphony by Haydn is paired with Brahms' famous Haydn variations, and the Bloch Concerto Grosso completes the picture with a modern composer's demonstration that the techniques of the masters can still be used to produce interesting music. In November, the first of three ``nationalist'' programs joins Beethoven's humanistic attitude toward his country with the music of Carl Maria von Weber, who brought a true German feeling to his operas.
The fall season ends with two well-known Russian composers, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, and we then begin spring with works by three Americans, including the ever-popular Appalachian Spring. The final concert of the year, in May, might be called ``the last gasp of tonality,'' for while it features very accessible works by Wagner and Mahler, the new musical freedoms introduced by these two composers were the foundation for the atonal music that characterized the first half of the 20th century.
This will be a very eclectic and exciting season, and we hope you will enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoy bringing it to you.
This Web page written by Geoff Kuenning
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