Baylor Symphony Opens Season Sept. 30

by Richard Veit

The Baylor University Symphony Orchestra will make its first appearance of the 1999-2000 academic year with a concert at 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 30, in Jones Concert Hall. The program will include music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Strauss and Paul Hindemith.
The Mozart and Strauss works will be conducted by Stephen Heyde, Baylor's Mary Franks Thompson Professor of Orchestral Studies and Conductor-in-Residence. The Hindemith works will be led by Dean Emeritus Daniel Sternberg, who founded the orchestra in 1944 and remained its conductor for 35 years. Featured in the Strauss works will be soprano Lynda Keith McKnight, assistant professor of vocal studies.
The program will open with a performance of the overture to Mozart's The Magic Flute. This opera was premiered in Vienna on Sept. 30, 1791, just five weeks before its composer's death.
A late work by Strauss, his Four Last Songs from 1948, will follow. These songs are titled "Spring," "September," "Going to Sleep" and "At Sunset."
Hindemith's symphony, "Mathis der Maler," utilizes musical themes from the opera of that name. Its three movements are descriptive pieces, depicting three of the magnificent scenes produced by painter Matthias Grünewald (1480-1528) to adorn the altarpiece at St. Anthony's Church in Isenheim, Germany. The symphony was premiered in Berlin on March 12, 1934, and the opera Mathis der Maler received its initial hearing two and a half months later in Zurich, Switzerland.
This concert by the Baylor Symphony Orchestra is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Baylor School of Music at 710-3991.