Baylor Symphony Orchestra Opens Season Sept. 22

by Richard Veit

The 102-member Baylor University Symphony Orchestra will perform its first concert of the 2003-2004 school year at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 22, in Jones Concert Hall. The orchestra is led by Stephen Heyde, Baylor's Conductor-in-Residence and director of orchestral activities.
This event is presented by Baylor University School of Music, in collaboration with the Center for American and Jewish Studies.
The program will open with the overture to Mozart's opera Die Entfnhrung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio"), which features the exotic sound of janissary music -- percussion effects meant to evoke a Turkish setting. Graduate student Norman Gamboa will conduct the overture.
The orchestra will follow with a work from 1982 by American composer Joseph Schwantner. Scored for narrator and orchestra, his New Morning for the World sets to music the words of slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Serving as narrator with the Baylor Symphony Orchestra will be The Rev. Kerry Burkley.
Concluding the program will be a performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 36.
"When the Bureau of Arts and Industry published this symphony in 1804, it was new music, in the best sense," said Dr. Robin Wallace, director of graduate studies in the School of Music. "Its rich instrumentation, its extravagant size and its often mocking spirit marked it out as a work to be reckoned with, by a composer whose growing international reputation allowed him to get away with things that a lesser man could not."
The concert is free of charge and open to the public. For more information, call the Baylor University School of Music at 710-3991.