Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Tanya Bannister Returns to Harrisburg

If you heard Tanya Bannister’s Market Square Concerts recital in January of 2008 at Market Square Church, you might want to know she’s playing a concerto this weekend with the Harrisburg Symphony!

Last year, she played the “Handel” Variations of Johannes Brahms, several pieces by Chopin and a piece that she had premiered, written for her by Christopher Theofanidis, “All Dreams Begin With a Horizon.”

This weekend, it will be Mozart on the program with Stuart Malina conducting the Harrisburg Symphony: the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, one of Mozart’s most popular concertos if not one of his finest. (You can read my up-close-and-personal post at Thoughts on a Train here.)

This is a work Mozart himself regarded very highly. It’s one of three concertos he composed in a few months’ span around the same time he was writing the opera, The Marriage of Figaro with which the A Major Concerto shares a good deal of its lively spirit.

The symphony’s concerts will be held at the Forum on Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm.

Also on the program, Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin,” the Serenade for Winds by Richard Strauss (the one he wrote when he was 17) and a rather light-hearted symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich (compared to most of his other large-scale dramatic symphonic works) even though it bears the Beethoven-haunted number “9.” (You can read more about Shostakovich's 9th here.)

At her website, you can hear her play Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

Incidentally, for this concert the Harrisburg Symphony is joining the nationwide food drive, Orchestras Feeding America. Please consider bringing canned goods and dried food items that can be donated to the cause when you come to the concert. You can find a list of recommended items on this page.

- Dr. Dick

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