Guest cello soloist Cicely Parnas. Photo by Christian Steiner
The Asheville Symphony Orchestra (ASO) presents Eine Kleine Rhine Musik: Brahms–Haydn–Schumann, on Saturday, January 14, at 8 p.m., at the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium. The evening of Germanic composers will be conducted by Jacksonville Symphony music director Courtney Lewis, a University of Cambridge graduate who has served as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic and as associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra. American cellist Cicely Parnas, who was named an inaugural Young Artist in Residence on NPR’s Performance Today in 2011 and who made her Carnegie Hall concerto debut in 2012, will perform.
The program opens with Johannes Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn, a work of depth and intense emotion composed in homage to Haydn’s classical tradition. Though the piece was based on a theme that Brahms believed to have been composed by Haydn, historians have deemed this unlikely and the true creator remains a mystery.
“Variations has a very special place in my heart,” says Lewis. “It’s the first piece I recorded for BBC Radio 3 with the Ulster Orchestra, and the recording sessions in my hometown, Belfast, are a happy memory. The music is understated but subtle, full of grace, and the finale never fails to move musicians and audiences alike.”
Next, Parnas joins the ASO for Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C Major, a musical masterpiece that was presumed lost for nearly two hundred years before a copy of the score was discovered in 1961. “I love the lighthearted elegance and emotional variation in this piece,” says Parnas. “It’s joyful, serious, thoughtful, exciting and beautiful. And, I think it’s unique in the way that it treats the cello as a virtuosic instrument, since it wasn’t considered virtuosic by many at the time. Mozart, for example, never wrote a cello concerto, so we only have a few pieces from that time period in the repertoire.”
Guest conductor Courtney Lewis. Photo by Renee Parenteau
Schumann’s masterful Symphony No. 3, Rhenish, inspired by a journey he took to the Rhineland with his wife, closes the program. The piece, which represents elements of the couple’s travels, is the last written by the composer. “For years Schumann’s symphonies were looked upon with a little disdain, with accusations of over-thick orchestration,” says Lewis. “But all four of them are right at the center of my repertoire and I love programming them. With a little tender loving care the orchestration shines, and Schumann’s melodic ideas are original and unusual. Rhenish is the best known of the four symphonies, perhaps because of the programmatic element. Schumann manages to capture perfectly the flow of the Rhine in the first movement, and the grandeur of the Cologne cathedral in the fourth.”
Thomas Wolfe Auditorium is located at 87 Haywood Street in Asheville. Tickets are $22–$62 depending on seating section. Reduced youth and student pricing is available. Tickets can be purchased online at ashevillesymphony.org, by phone at 828.254.7046 or in person at the US Cellular Center box office.
