The Oklahoma City Philharmonic offered their 2nd concert of the new season on Saturday, October 6^th.  Entitled Songs of Land and Sea the program featured guest violinist Gil Shaham in the Violin Concerto in D Major, Op 77 by Johannes Brahms written for and with Joseph Joachim, the culmination of twenty-five years of a musical friendship. Mr. Shaham is internationally recognized as one of today’s most virtuosic and engaging artists. Just this past May, the ailing pianist Yefim Bronfman withdrew at the last minute from a performance of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Shaham stepped in to play the Brahms Violin Concerto and the New York Times wrote:  “…the performance, put together with scant rehearsal time, was rhapsodic and compelling…” The Violin Concerto was begun in the summer of 1878, at the composer's favorite resort at Pörtschach am Wörthersee in the Carinthian Alps and many believe they hear something of this idyllic natural landscape in the opening movement. 

The concert opens with Mikhail Glinka’s Kamarinskya, of which Tchaikovsky said “all Russian symphonic music is in Kamarinskaya, just as all of an oak tree is contained in an acorn.”   Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes follow; this suite compiled from the six orchestral pieces that introduce the acts and link scenes in the opera. Evocative portraits of the sea at different times of day and in different weather conditions, they are also psychological studies that chronicle the dramatic story in the opera. And Zoltán Kodály’s Dances of Galanta.complete the first half of the program.  In a preface to his score, Kodály writes: “Galánta is a small Hungarian market town known to travelers between Vienna and Budapest. The composer passed there seven years of his childhood. There existed at that time a gypsy band that has since disappeared. This was the first ‘orchestral sonority’ that came to the ears of the child.”

The call of nature and the gypsy heard throughout this program Songs of Land and Sea with Gil Shaham and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic on Sunday October 28th at 5:00pm CST!

To round out the program, Performance Oklahoma offers performances of works by two composers featured on a program given by A Far Cry, the guest artists on the Oklahoma City Community College Cultural Arts Series' first concert of the season, given on Tuesday, September 25th at the Bruce Owen Theatre.  Founded in 2007 by 17 young musicians explores the traditional boundaries of classical music, experimenting with the ways it is prepared, performed and experienced.  We'll hear Fiddlers Op 1 by Einojuhani Rautavaara and Astor Piazzolla's Coral and Canyengue.