Leave your guess in the comments, and be entered to win a pair of tickets to Beethoven’s Fifth! Contest will close Thursday at 3 PM.

For more information and to apply, visit our website!

The purpose of Classical Connections is to further engage Utah Symphony guests during their experience at the hall, offering a new level of contextual understanding about the various connections that each performance has to other disciplines, art forms, and community issues. It’s basically another way for us to make your experience at the symphony as insightful and enjoyable as possible!

In the coming weeks, you can plan on seeing the display at most concerts, with various rotating content topics that relate to that evening’s repertoire. This past weekend, Classical Connections featured information about the human voice and how it is such a versatile musical instrument. It was a pleasure for us to also work with the National Center for Voice and Speech to compile most of the educational content for this particular display.

Come join us this weekend for the Messiah Sing-In to see this particular content rotation of Classical Connections up in the lobby again, and don’t forget to share YOUR voice on the display’s comment board as well as with the 3,000-voice audience choir that will fill the hall each night!

Happy Belated Birthday to German pianist and composer Fanny Mendelssohn, who was born 206 years ago. Fanny was the older sister of Felix Mendelssohn, but she was a talented composer and pianist in her own right.

Fanny Mendelssohn’s musical talent was tolerated by her father, but she didn’t receive the musical training and encouragement that her brother did. She was primarily self-taught. Fortunately her husband was supportive of her composing and performing in private salons. Her first, and probably only public performance took place when she was 33, performing her brother’s first piano concerto. Fanny composed over 450 pieces, most of them solo piano works. Most of her works were unpublished during her lifetime, or published under Felix’s name, but the year before her death she decided to publish a song collection under her name.

Fanny wrote many solo piano works entitled Song Without Words. Here’s one of them:

We are very excited for the performance this weekend – Berlioz’ Childhood of Christ. If you’ve noticed a bit more Berlioz being programmed lately, it’s because our Music Director, Thierry Fischer, is a huge Berlioz fan. In his own words:

“I don’t just like Berlioz, I need to perform Berlioz very regularly. He’s a composer very close to my inspiration. He wrote music by putting his own life in music, so it’s very easy to identify all his troubles, fears, hopes, nightmares. His imagination was absolutely stupefying.”

Childhood of Christ is a very interesting work for many reasons. First, Berlioz was not a religious man, so the fact that he composed a “sacred trilogy”, as he called it, was unusual. But he was a huge fan of church music, so that was his inspiration. Second, it’s one of the few works of his that the audiences and critics of the time actually liked! They usually felt that his music was bizarre sounding, but they loved how simple and melodic this work is:

During the second performance on December 24, calls of “encore” drowned out the Alleluias at the end of “The Repose of the Holy Family,” prompting the composer to turn to the audience and shout, “We’re going to play the piece again, but this time please allow it to finish.”
- John Mangum, Program Designer/Annotator, Los Angeles Philharmonic

For such a beautiful work, it doesn’t get performed very often, perhaps because of the large chorus and soloists needed. If you’re a fan of choral music, this is a concert you won’t want to miss!

NPR Music had a great article two years ago about the piece, which includes a complete recording! Check it out!

“The concert, which also included music by Richard Wagner and American composer Christopher Rouse, showed new levels of stylistic definition and ensemble unity, especially during Beethoven’s programmatically descriptive symphony.”
- The Salt Lake Tribune

“Thierry Fischer continues to knock it out of the park with his Beethoven symphony cycle. The Utah Symphony, under Fischer’s guiding hand, painted a vivid musical picture and offered a clear window into the emotions of the three composers on the program Friday night.”
- Reichel Recommends

“holy geez, it was amazing; the entire orchestra did a phenomenal job, but the main percussionist—absolutely stupendous and literally had me holding my breath at the end.”
- LifeIsBYUtiful

Were you at the concert this weekend? Let us know what you thought! Please leave your review in the comments.

We would like to share a moment with you in observation of Veterans Day. Echoing President Woodrow Wilson’s words when it was first proclaimed, we are filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who have served and died for our country.

It took a while to come up with a good musical selection for today, but I settled on Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

Copland, in his autobiography, wrote of the piece:

“Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, had written to me at the end of August about an idea he wanted to put into action for the 1942-43 concert season. During World War I he had asked British composers for a fanfare to begin each orchestral concert. It had been so successful that he thought to repeat the procedure in World War II with American composers”.

In honor of Halloween, Beethoven is exploring one of the quirkier landmarks in Salt Lake.