Audience favorite Ryan Anthony will be the soloist with the San Juan Symphony at 3 p.m. Sunday in the Community Concert Hall. With his dimpled charm and virtuosic trumpet playing, Anthony will perform a concerto composed in his honor. This will be the world premiere.
Chicago-based composer Jim Stephenson has created innumerable concertos for many instruments – piano, violin, flute, trombone, and tuba. Sunday’s premiere will mark Stephenson’s third trumpet concerto. The first two were dedicated to other rising trumpet virtuosi: Jeffrey Work and Rex Richardson.
Stephenson’s new concerto for Anthony will be the center piece of a strong program – two works by giants in the history of classical music. The concert will open with Beethoven’s Overture to “The Creatures of Prometheus,” a work written early in the composer’s career for ballet, an art form emerging out of opera at the turn of the 19th century. “Prometheus” was Beethoven’s first and only music composed for ballet.
Based on the heroic theme of bringing science, the arts, and fire to humanity, the ballet itself is now lost, but the overture has become a favorite Beethoven classic for orchestras world wide.
The concert will close with the majestic Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Composed in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Terror, the symphony illuminates one facet of the composer’s own heroic struggle against tyranny.
The entire program will demonstrate the skill and ability of the third and final candidate for the job of music director. Geoffrey Robson travels from the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and an academic posting at the University of Central Arkansas for his introduction to our own regional symphony. Wish him well.
If you go
San Juan symphony, 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 20, Fort Lewis College Community Concert Hall, works by Beethoven, Stephenson, and Shostakovich, conducted by Geoffrey Robson with soloist Ryan Anthony. Tickets range from $16 students to $50, with discounts for seniors and groups, at the Durango Welcome Center, 802 Main Avenue, www.durangoconcerts.com, or door. Info: 247-7657.
