Journey into romantic music

Top cellist billed for PE orchestra

AMERICAN cellist Caleb VaughnJones will play with the Eastern Cape Philharmonic Orchestra (ECPO) in its first symphony concert of the year in the Feather Market Centre at 3pm on Sunday.

The concert – A Romantic Journey – celebrates the music of four much-loved composers – Mendelssohn, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.

“Music of the Romantic era was exciting, passionate and full of life; and so were the composers who wrote it – which explains why it is still so popular with audiences today,” a spokesman for the ECPO said.

A Romantic Journey will take the audience from Mendelssohn’s German opera Heimkehr aus der Fremde through Austria, where Schubert wrote his famously Unfinished Symphony, to Russia; and works by Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.

Port Elizabeth-born conductor David Scarr will be guiding the ECPO through the wonderful world of these much-loved Romantic composers. Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations features VaughnJones, who has made his home in Port Elizabeth.

This challenging work, which displays the enormous range of the cello, was said to have moved fellow composer Franz Liszt to exclaim: “Here, at last, is music again.”

Vaugh – Jones is well up for the challenge – a graduate of the Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University, he has performed across North America, Asia, the West Indies and South Africa.

As a member of the elite Sphinx Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, he toured through the US during September and October last year, with the highlight being a sold-out performance in Carnegie Hall.

Tchaikovsky was the only one of the featured composers to have actually heard a public performance of his work – strangely, all the other works only received their first performances after the deaths of their composers.

Mendelssohn’s short opera was composed for his parents’ silver wedding anniversary, and although his mother encouraged him to publish it, he felt it was too personal. It was first performed in public only in 1851, four years after his death.

Mussorgsky composed and rearranged his Night on a Bare Mountain at least three times during his lifetime, but none of these versions was ever performed. After his death, his colleague Rimsky-Korsakov edited a number of his works, and the dramatic story of a witches’ Sabbath on St John’s Eve was finally performed five years later.

Tickets for A Romantic Journey are on sale at Computicket: (041) 586-3177 at R85 and R100 with a limited number of pensioners’ and pupils’ tickets at R65.

Music of the Romantic era was exciting, passionate and full of life