The sounds of Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, Duke Ellington and more will fill the air as the Kenyon Department of Music closes the academic year with a month full of concerts.
The Kenyon College Symphonic Wind Ensemble, under the direction of Professor of Music Dane Heuchemer, will perform its spring concert Sunday, April 9, at 3 p.m. in Rosse Hall. The 50-person band will perform works by several composers. Brass musicians will open the concert with Giovanni Gabrieli’s late Renaissance “Sonata pian’ e forté.” The full band will perform “The March to the Scaffold” from Hector Berlioz’s 1830 masterpiece “Symphonie Fantastique,” and Eric Whitacre’s colorful “Ghost Train Triptych.”
Student assistant conductor Katherine Connolly ’17, from Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania, will lead the band through John Barnes Chance’s “Incantation and Dance.” The concert also will feature George Gershwin’s beloved “Rhapsody in Blue,” featuring pianist Pei-Sin Shen, an Ohio State University doctoral candidate.
The Kenyon Jazz Ensemble, under the direction of Professor of Music Ted Buehrer, performs its spring concert Sunday, April 9, at 7 p.m. in Rosse Hall. The 17-piece big band will play a number of songs in Latin grooves including Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova “Wave,” Laura Andrea Leguía’s Afro-Peruvian landó “Junio y Garua” and a samba arrangement of the jazz standard “Invitation.” Other selections by Duke Ellington, Lee Morgan, Bob Mintzer and Charles Mingus round out the concert.
On Sunday, April 30, at 8 p.m. in Rosse Hall, the 110-voice Kenyon Community Choir will join the Knox County Symphony for a presentation of two masterworks: “Nänie” by Johannes Brahms and “Requiem in D Minor” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, featuring student soloists. The concert will be directed by Professor of Music Benjamin Locke, who conducts the symphony.
“Nänie” was one of the last compositions Brahms wrote for chorus and orchestra. It was written in commemoration of the death of his friend Anselm Feuerbach, a neoclassicist painter. “The work is notable in how it is free of foreboding or anguish; rather, by utilizing long, expressive melodic lines in the keys of D major and F-sharp major, it focuses on the aspect of remembrance as a healing force,” Locke said.
Many myths surround the composition of Mozart’s “Requiem,” Locke said, as the work was still in progress when Mozart died in late 1791. Only the first movement is entirely in Mozart’s hand, and at the request of Mozart’s widow, the “Requiem” was completed by Joseph Eybler and Franz Xaver Süssmayr. “It is unclear how much was completed according to Mozart’s direction, but the ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Benedictus’ are considered to be entirely of Süssmayr’s invention,” Locke said.
Additional concerts this spring include performances by flute, gamelan, harp and percussion ensembles as well as a presentation by an opera and music theater workshop. The full schedule:
The Community Choir and Knox County Symphony joint concert costs $10 for adults, $7 for seniors and is free for students. All other concerts are free.