PATRICIA C. SYAK | Symphony Notes Masterworks concert, 'Cats' are on schedule

The concluding Youngstown Symphony Orchestra Masterworks concert and Broadway Series performance of the season will be presented during upcoming weeks at Edward W. Powers Auditorium.
On April 24 at 8 p.m., the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Isaiah Jackson welcome pianist Fabio Bidini who will perform the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2.
Rachmaninoff followed three careers simultaneously -- composer, concert pianist and conductor. Besides being one of the most successful and highly regarded composers of his time, he was also one of the most formidable pianists of the 20th century. Rachmininoff's C minor Piano Concerto is one of his best-loved works. The romantic passion, rhythmic liveliness and charm of the work captivated audience and press alike when it was first performed with the composer as soloist by the Moscow Philharmonic in 1901. Since then, it has been one of the most frequently played piano concertos.
"The Russian Five" composers' ideal was to produce a basically Russian art. Once and for all, they would shake loose from the French and German influence to which Russian music, in their opinion, had been subservient for so long a time. The composers wanted an art no longer imitating that produced elsewhere, but one so indigenous that its Russian source could no longer be doubted.
Influential musician
Rimsky-Korsakov was the dean of the national school. He did not found the school; others, such as Mussorgsky, had greater native talent than he. But as the finest and best-schooled theoretician of the group, Rimsky-Korsakov was the most influential member and his music embodies the principles and ideals of that group more completely and more successfully than that of his colleagues. Rimsky-Korsakov is represented on the evening's program by his "Capriccio Espagnol."
"The Russian Five" Mussorgsky was a great and original force who fully realized the national group's philosophy. "Pictures at an Exhibition" was written in 1874 as a suite for the piano. The work is best known to concert-goers as an orchestral work. Though several fine transcriptions exist, the best know and the one to be performed by the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra was done by Maurice Ravel in 1923. The composition, the result of a posthumous exhibition by Mussorgsky's friend Victor Hartmann, is a tonal representation of different Hartmann paintings as seen through the eyes of the composer.
'Cats' is coming
America's favorite musical, "Cats," completes the Broadway Series on April 26 and 27 at Powers Auditorium. Sponsored by First Place Bank Community Foundation in conjunction with the Symphony Society, "Cats" performances begin at 8 p.m.
One of the most exhilarating and innovative musicals ever staged, "Cats" is stunningly costumed and lushly orchestrated.
Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber began setting music to T.S. Eliot's poems in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" in 1977. Later, he arranged the music for concerts and still later reworked the concept into a dramatic structure that opened in London's West End in 1981.
In a song and dance spectacle, such whimsically named characters as Jennyanydots, who sits all day and becomes active only at night, the never-satisfied Rum Tum Tugger, the well-fed elegant cat about town, Bustopher Jones, the knockabout clowns Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, the patriarch Old Deuteronomy, the mysterious Mr. Mistoffelees and the glamorous Grizabella have entertained more than 8 million people and made "Cats" the longest-running musical in history.
XPatricia C. Syak is executive director of Youngstown Symphony Society. Her column now appears in Entertainment Extra the first Thursday of each month.