MOUNT VERNON — The Knox County Symphony continues its 61st season on Saturday, Oct. 31, with a program featuring both familiar classics and a striking, complex contemporary work.
The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. in the R.R. Hodges Chapel Auditorium at Mount Vernon Nazarene University.
Tickets are available at the door, with reduced pricing for senior citizens. Students can attend free with a valid ID. Click here for additional ticket information.
The program includes Aaron Copland’s “Variations on a Shaker Melody” (1967), much loved for its richly textured treatment of the graceful song “Simple Gifts.” Copland composed the Variations as an orchestral set piece, drawing on a section of his 1944 score for the ballet Appalachian Spring.
Also on the program is “The Thieving Magpie Overture” by Gioachino Rossini, a lively, playful piece that was composed in 1817 but that has proved irresistible to modern film directors, who have used some of its tunes in movies such as “A Clockwork Orange” and “Once Upon a Time in America.”
The symphony performed part of this work at its children’s concert in September. At this concert, the entire piece will be played.
The contemporary work on the program is “Imagine This,” an intricately patterned piece by Serbian-American composer Vera Stanojevic, which the symphony commissioned in 2019. In the piece’s two movements, “Echoes from the Mountains” and “Kubik-Musik,” staggered instrumental entrances create an evocative, layered dialogue.
It’s a challenging but satisfying work to master, and Stanojevic herself attended a recent rehearsal to offer the orchestra suggestions.
In a nod to the season, the symphony will also perform Modest Mussorgsky’s celebrated “Night on Bald Mountain” (1867), a highly dramatic tone poem evoking an imagined witches’ sabbath. Audiences may know the work from an arrangement used in the Walt Disney film “Fantasia.”
Rounding out the program is a playful, clever piece, “Perpetuoso,” by Brian Holmes. The children’s concert also performed this work.
About the Knox County Symphony
Founded in 1965, the Knox County Symphony comprises more than 60 musicians, including many local community members, students from Kenyon College, Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and area high schools. Benjamin Locke, a Kenyon College music professor, has conducted the county symphony since 1984.