Albany Symphony to host concerts at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
Two-time Grammy award-winning Albany Symphony is hosting a pair of concerts at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on Saturday, Mar. 16 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Mar. 17 at 3:00 p.m., they announced in a press release.
The concerts will present the most celebrated instrumental work of the Baroque era, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, as well as new vocal work, The History of Red, by Reena Esmail featuring Soprano Molly Netter, and Murmurations, a beautiful, nature-inspired work by Derek Bermel.
The Four Seasons was composed in the early 1700s, the release said. It is the best known of Vivaldi’s works and a revolutionary work of musical tone-painting, based very literally on sonnets Vivaldi wrote to depict the seasons. Vivaldi’s imagery throughout the work includes flowing creeks, singing birds, a shepherd and his barking dog, buzzing flies, storms, drunken dancers and warm winter fires.
Albany Symphony Music Director, David Alan Miller, has invited four young violinists, specialists in authentic Baroque-style performance who recently graduated from the Juilliard School’s acclaimed Historical Performance program, to perform the four concertos that make up the “Four Seasons”: Ravenna Lipchik, Edson Scheid, Amelia Sie and Shelby Yamin. They will be performing on authentic Baroque instruments.
“We are so excited to present Vivaldi’s masterpiece as he himself may have heard it,” Miller said in the release. “Our four soloists are all brilliant interpreters of Baroque style, and we are very excited to welcome them.
“We’re also thrilled to present brilliant new works by two longtime friends of the Symphony, Reena Esmail and Derek Bermel,” he continued. “Reena’s work features Molly Netter, a remarkable vocal artist we’ve been eager to present. I promise this will be an absolutely delicious way to spend a cold winter’s evening or afternoon at the legendary Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.”
The Symphony will perform Reena Esmail’s The History of Red, inspired by the first time the composer heard Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 at the Ford Theater in Los Angeles with her parents. Hearing this piece at age 14 was a pivotal
moment in her decision to become a composer, according to the release.
The History of Red is a work for soprano and orchestra in which the singer grapples with the world around her. Chickasaw poet and writer Linda Hogan’s beautiful text is the voice of an adult woman, the release said, aware not only of her current world but of the entire, complex history of her ancestors. She is an Indian-American composer whose work bridges the worlds of Indian and Western Classical music and holds degrees from The Julliard School and the Yale School of Music.
“I wrote this piece as the pandemic was raging around the world, as the effects of decades of racism hit a new fever pitch in the US, and as we headed into the 2020 presidential election with so much trepidation,” Esmail said in the release. “My own complicated history, and the history of this time, is also embedded in every note of this piece.”
The featured vocalist is Canadian-American Soprano Molly Netter, the release said. Highly sought after as a soloist, engagements have included her debut with the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammerat Carnegie Hall, the premiere of Katherine Balch’s Illuminate with the California Symphony, as well as solo appearances with both the Fort Worth and Johnstown Symphonies for Handel’s Messiah.
The program also features Derek Bermel’s Murmurations, composed in 2015, which depicts vivid imagery through music. When Bermel listens to and watches a string orchestra perform, he is reminded of a flock of birds, the release said. They glide and dive in formation, soaring together or splitting into layers of counterpoint before regrouping into a single unit.
According to Bermel, during a year living in Rome, he was often treated to the graceful spectacle of a starling murmuration. Their stunning, geometrical displays of aviation before settling down for the night are a humbling sight. In Murmurations, the release said he attempted to map onto a musical structure some of the behavior he observed in the starlings’ flight.