Just 11 days left until SPO's first concert of the season!!

Voyages will be presented at the Salvation Army Citadel on Friday, October 3rd – an unusual Friday night concert for the SPO. The program will include the amazing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. Because of the water themes in that piece, artistic director Ronald Royer decided to pair it with "Tall Ships" from the Halifax Harbour suite by Canadian composer Elizabeth Raum.

The centrepiece of the program, however, is Bruch's virtuosic Violin Concerto No. 1, performed by Conrad Chow, who will be making his fourth appearance with the SPO. He spoke recently about the concerto, saying:

Bruch is the height of the Romantic era. It's like the filet mignon of violin composers, Romantic composers.

It has an interesting structure, too, the concerto. Oftentimes, we have a long first movement, and that's where a lot of the story arc happens. We have a slow, romantic second movement and then a celebratory third movement. As I was looking at the history of this concerto, Bruch actually wrote the second movement to begin with. It was supposed to be a standalone piece of music – I think he was going to make it a symphonic tone poem. His friends said, "Man, this is really good, but what you really need to do is to turn it into a concerto for the violin."

And he said "Oh, okay. That makes sense. But I have to do another movement before it. You know, this is slow, so I can't make it the first movement." So he wrote a first movement that's a lot shorter than the average first movement. It's very compact and dense, and it's an amazing first movement, but the second movement is the real crown jewel.

Make sure to join us. Click here to purchase your tickets.

Media Inquiries:  mjones@spo.ca

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