PATRICIA C. SYAK | Symphony Notes Orchestra will perform popular, modern pieces

More orchestras are performing works composed after 1915, and more patrons are attending symphony orchestra concerts. It's a happy occurrence for music lovers and orchestra managers.
It would seem the music of our time is alive and well and those who fill 33 million seats in American concert halls each year are responsive to it. That is not surprising when one considers the confluence of styles evident in the music: virtuoso display, jazz harmonies, spiky rhythms and even humor find their way into the manuscripts.
The Oct. 20 Youngstown Symphony Orchestra program led by Isaiah Jackson will highlight works by American composers who possess the lucky combination of writing music of structure and at the same time exercising an immediate appeal to mixed audiences. Both selections, performed for the first time during the 1990s, will receive their premiere outings in Youngstown during this concert.
Ellen Taafle Zwilich's Flute Concerto commissioned by the Boston Symphony and Doriot Anthony Dwyer, YSO's guest artist for the selection, was first performed April 26, 1990. Six years later, Michael Daugherty's homage to the king of keyboard kitsch, "Le Tombeau de Liberace," was heard in Pittsburgh.
The first women to win a Pulitzer Prize for composition and the first to receive a doctoral degree in composition from the Juilliard School of Music, Zwilich's music has come to the forefront because it is performed, recorded and broadcast and above all listened to and liked by all sorts of audiences the world over.
Playful piece: Michael Daugherty has covered a unique niche in classical music. He has combined his Baby Boomer affection for pop culture with his background as a rock and jazz musician. Daugherty has said of his concert mucic inspired by contemporary American popular culture, "There's nothing wrong with being a little playful," and he shares this playfulness with us in his tribute to the pianist and entertainer known as Liberace.
"Le Tombeau de Liberace," performed by pianist John Nauman, presents a meditation on the sublime. From the first movement, "Rhinestone Kickstep," which conveys a feeling of strutting down the glittering cement streets of Las Vegas in boogie-woogie rhythms, to the arpeggiated piano riffs based on a sequence of musical notes on the wall of Liberace's famous piano shaped pool, to the concluding "Candelabra Rhumba," a pianistic tour de force that recreates the excitement of a Vegas show band keeping the candles on Liberace's candelabra lit, we are once again reminded why audiences are drawn to 20th century music.
Obviously, concertgoers still flock to their favorite cathedrals of music to hear long-cherished works and the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra October program provides us with such pleasures. The Orchestra performs Mozart's Symphony No. 32, a more or less one movement jewel of a piece, and Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 4 Mozartiana.
Not unlike composer Michael Daugherty in the 20th century, Russian born composer Tchaikovsky, in the century before, paid tribute to another musical icon: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Tickets for the concert, which is underwritten in part by Butler Wick & amp; Co., are available by calling the Symphony box office at (330) 744 -0264.
Opera: To witness another dimension of Mozart's genius, call the Symphony box office to secure tickets to Cos & igrave; fan tutteOct. 29 at Powers Auditorium at 8 p.m. This timeless masterpiece and provocative comic story, composed at the height of Mozart's career, will be sung in Italian with English supertitles by the San Francisco opera touring company. Production assistance is provided by Ricciuti Balog & amp; Partners Architects.
No form of music current in Mozart's time was left untouched by him, and none is without a matchless contribution by him.
Mozart is the musical yardstick by which others are judged and his operas are no exception. Cos & igrave; fan tutte (Women Are Like That) is a charming tale of love and fidelity -- a cynical old man leads two naive officers into a scandalous wager: that their fianc & eacute;es will betray their trust within one day.
XPatricia C. Syak is Executive Director of the Youngstown Symphony Society