The Binghamton Philharmonic Orchestra's upcoming concert, "Passionate Discovery," will pair familiar works by Mozart and Tchaikovsky with music by Florence Price, whose compositions have received renewed attention in recent years.
Music Director Daniel Hege says the program will begin with a surprising version of Mozart's Don Giovanni overture, arranged by Ferruccio Busoni.
"We just happened to discover it when we were looking at programming Mozart's Don Giovanni overture," Hege says. "But we knew we had trombones on the program too. And in that research, we stumbled over this Ferruccio Busoni arrangement."
The arrangement preserves Mozart's original music but adds trombones near the end, along with music from the opera's finale.
"Busoni takes the final presto from the opera itself and basically puts it right into the end, using the trombones as the voices that were missing," Hege explains. "It's a very dramatic way to open the concert."
He says Busoni's version also solves a practical problem with performing the original overture in a concert setting.
"The Don Giovanni overture, if we were just to play it the way it is, it ends on this half cadence very quietly right before the first aria," Hege says. "So it's not as effective an ending. But Busoni gives us a very good concert ending."
The first half of the concert will continue with Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, a work that grew out of Tchaikovsky's relationship with Mily Balakirev, one of the composers known as the Mighty Handful.
Balakirev encouraged Tchaikovsky to write music inspired by Shakespeare's tragedy and suggested musical representations for characters and themes in the play.
"He told him he should write something based on Shakespeare's play of Romeo and Juliet," Hege says. "And then even gave him some suggestions about the characters he could write about through music, like Friar Lawrence, the Montagues and the Capulets and their swordfights."
Tchaikovsky's original version premiered in 1870 but was not well received. He continued revising the work over the next decade, producing the version most often performed today.
"That went over much better than the premiere," Hege says. "And it's also thought by many scholars that Balakirev didn't have very much to do with the second version of it."
The familiar love theme from the work, however, has long since taken on a life of its own.
"Anyone who looks at it on paper and says, 'Oh, I don't know this piece'—once they hear that love theme, they'll say, 'Oh my gosh, that's been in every romantic movie,'" Hege says. "It's made its way into pop culture in so many different ways."
The second half of the concert will feature Florence Price's Symphony No. 1, a work that Hege describes as one of the significant musical rediscoveries of recent decades.
Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887 and later studied at the New England Conservatory of Music before establishing herself as a composer in Chicago. Her First Symphony was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, bringing her considerable recognition during her lifetime.
Interest in Price's music was rekindled after the discovery of manuscripts and other materials at her abandoned summer home in 2009.
"It was just simply sitting in a closet, I believe, in one of the rooms, and no one had ever bothered to even notice it," Hege says. "Someone had the insight to say, 'I think we need to bring this to someone else's attention.'"
He says Price's music is accessible and combines late-Romantic orchestral writing with folk influences and African American musical traditions.
"The first movement really sounds a little bit more like 19th-century music," Hege says. "It has a folk-like quality, but it also has orchestral textures and melodies that in some ways resemble Dvořák."
The symphony's remaining movements are shorter and draw on Price's experience with church music and African American musical traditions, including the Juba dance.
"Her music is very accessible. It's tonal, it's folk-like, it's very rhythmically charged and propulsive at times. It's reflective at times," Hege says. "I think people are going to find something in this symphony that they would find in any other great work, even of the 19th century or early 20th century."
Hege will also lead a pre-concert conversation at 6:30 p.m., offering additional background on the music and the composers.
The Binghamton Philharmonic Orchestra presents "Passionate Discovery" on Saturday, September 26, at 7:30 p.m. at the Broome County Forum, 236 Washington Street in downtown Binghamton. A pre-concert chat with Daniel Hege begins at 6:30 p.m. in the recital hall. Admission is free for young people 17 and under. More information is available at binghamtonphilharmonic.org.