Baylor Symphony Will Perform on Nov. 26

by Richard Veit

The Baylor University Symphony Orchestra will present its final concert of the fall semester at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 26, in Jones Concert Hall. The concert will be conducted by Stephen Heyde, Baylor's Mary Franks Thompson Professor of Orchestral Studies and Conductor-in-Residence, and by graduate assistant Allen Hightower.
The program will open with Felix Mendelssohn's concert overture "The Hebrides," which was written in the years following the 20-year-old composer's visit to Scotland. Premiered at Covent Garden in 1832, it remains one of Mendelssohn's most popular and enduring shorter works for orchestra. Hightower will conduct.
Alexander Borodin devoted many years to the creation of his opera "Prince Igor," but it was never performed during his lifetime. However, the opera's colorful "Polovtsian Dances," as orchestrated by Borodin's friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, premiered with great success in St. Petersburg in 1879, establishing a niche of their own as an independent work for orchestra. The Baylor Symphony Orchestra will perform the "Polovtsian Dances," without the optional choral parts, under the direction of Heyde.
Heyde also will conduct the final work on the program, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64. One of Tchaikovsky's most often performed compositions, the Fifth Symphony premiered in St. Petersburg in 1888 to mixed reviews. Though the audience was enthusiastic, most critics of the time felt that the new symphony was beneath its composer's prodigious gifts, and Tchaikovsky, too, was dissatisfied with the work. Over the years, however, audiences and music critics alike have embraced the symphony, and it has become a staple of the standard repertoire.
The concert by the Baylor Symphony Orchestra is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Baylor School of Music at 755-3991.