The Lowell Chamber Orchestra Inaugurates Fifth Season With A Concert That Redefines The Symphony

The Lowell Chamber Orchestra opens its fifth season Saturday, September 16, 2023, with music that redefines the symphony as genre. The evening will feature music by Brittney Benton, Yoko Nakatani, Vincent Persichetti, and Arnold Schönberg, bringing a historical approach to the ever changing façade of this genre.

Both Benton and Nakatani are very active composers who were commissioned by the Lowell Chamber Orchestra back in 2020 - at the height of the pandemic - to write works for "Lowell Threads," an initiative by the Lowell Chamber Orchestra to enlist composer into writing works around a particular genre. In this case, Nakatani, Benton, and two other composers, were asked to write works in response to the eccentric chamber symphonies of Darius Milhaud. The results was the album "Miniature Symphonies." On Saturday, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra will perform in public these two pieces since the recording's release in 2021.

The concert begins with Nakatani's one-movement "La Giclée" takes its inspiration from the joy of children as they splash through water, and produced a homage to George Gershwin in a short work that requires an unusual seating arrangement. Benton's "The Sentinel" is the musical telling of a fantastic tale in which a stone golem guards the entrance to a town, and the different movements as the creature slumbers, awakens. The evening will end with Arnold Schönberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, the work that started a trend in which composers had to learn to use much smaller forces than usual because of World War I.

The concert will also feature Adam Gallant, principal trumpet of the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, as a soloist in Persichetti's "The Hollow Men." This piece, while not technically a symphony, encompasses the profoundly deep meaning of the T. S. Eliot poem that inspired it.

As always, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra is presenting this concert for free, but donations are most necessary in order to keep its mission of providing the best of classical music without a socio-economic boundary to the Lowell population.

For more information, please visit https://lowellchamberorchestra.org/events/.

MINIATURE SYMPHONIES