Reno Phil music director and conductor Laura Jackson says that she took inspiration from next year's 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 'For this first concert, I just wanted to launch the season in a joyous and celebratory way, and to feature some of the greatest and most beloved works by American composers.'
Pianist Michelle Cann is featured in two pieces. One is the Piano Concerto in One Movement by Florence Price, one of the first prominent African American woman composers. The other is one of the most famous pieces in classical music, Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin.
Mark Clague, musicologist and professor at the University of Michigan, is also editor-in-chief of the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition. He says that, in Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin took the energy of jazz 'and brought it into the classical concert hall, really as a way to show that the jazz was an art music as well, that it wasn't like jazz was a lesser form of music or that popular music, that Broadway was a lesser form of music.' Gershwin, he believes, 'was using any source of inspiration that was in his sound world.'
The Reno Phil concerts are framed by two pieces by Aaron Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man and the suite from the ballet Appalachian Spring. In the latter, Laura Jackson says that Copland 'was trying to find a way of saying what he wanted to as an artist with simple and direct compositional techniques.' She continued that audiences of the 1940s, knowing that choreographer Martha Graham was depicting 'a pioneering young couple on their wedding day, I think that they just reacted to the sounds that they heard in a very personal way, with the overlay of their own experience and that of the American dream.'
The Reno Phil's 'American Masters' concerts are Saturday, October 11 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, October 12 at 4:00 p.m. at the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts in Reno. Renophil.com for information and tickets.
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Support for 'Arts on the Airwaves' comes from The Nevada Arts Council… a state agency that provides public funding and support to artists and organizations, that benefit Nevadans in cities and rural communities statewide. More at NVArtsCouncil.org.
