Two of Baylor University’s major instrumental ensembles, the Campus Orchestra and the Symphonic Band, will present a concert on Tuesday, November 16, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in Jones Concert Hall, located within the Glennis McCrary Music Building. For this concert, the Campus Orchestra’s forty-six string players will be augmented by eleven woodwind and brass players. The orchestra is led by Baylor University’s Conductor-in-Residence Stephen Heyde. The sixty-six-member Symphonic Band is conducted by Associate Director of Bands Isaiah Odajima.
Opening the program will be the Campus Orchestra to perform Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s Two Elegiac Melodies, Op. 34: “The Wounded Heart” and “The Last Spring.”
British cellist and composer Hugo Cole wrote his Black Lion Dances in 1962. They are a series of seven dances in diverse tempi and meters.
Next, the Campus Orchestra will play Don’t Tread on Me by Russell Peck. This is an orchestration of the first movement from the composer’s Signs of Life ii for string quartet.
The Symphonic Band’s portion of the program will begin with Frenergy by Canadian composer John Estacio. Conceived for orchestra in 1998, this piece has been transcribed for wind band by Fraser Linklater. “The title,” says composer Estacio, “comes from an amalgamation of the words ‘frenetic’ and ‘energy.’”
English composer Martin Ellerby wrote his four-movement Paris Sketches in 1994. According to Ellerby, “This is my personal tribute to a city I love, and each movement pays homage to some part of the French capital and to other composers who lived, worked, or passed through it, rather as did Ravel in his own tribute to the work of an earlier master in Le Tombeau de Couperin. Running like a unifying thread through the whole score is the idea of bells, a prominent feature of Paris life.
This concert is free of charge and open to the public. It is also available for livestreaming at baylor.edu/music/live.