Department of Music

• Sunday, January 25, 2009
• Old Cabell Hall
• 3:30pm
• $10 - $35 / 10 ARTS$

CHARLOTTESVILLE — The Charlottesville Symphony Society will present for the second year the Chamber Orchestra of Charlottesville with a concert on Sunday, January 25 at 3:30pm. As Charlottesville’s own professional chamber orchestra, the ensemble is a new and exciting opportunity for symphonic music in the community. The orchestra is dedicated to performing the wonderfully diverse literature written for smaller orchestral forces, and will feature many of the area’s finest instrumentalists, including several of the talented artist/teachers on the University of Virginia faculty. Led by Music Director Kate Tamarkin, the Chamber Serenade concert will also showcase the artistry of new UVA faculty oboist Aaron Hill.

From 2002-2008, Mr. Hill played principal oboe in the Flint Symphony Orchestra under Enrique Diemecke, including an appearance as a soloist performing Mozart's Oboe Concerto in 2007. He has also performed as a guest with other orchestras such as the Rochester Philharmonic, San Diego Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Hartford Symphony, and Windsor Symphony. In 2003, he appeared as principal oboe with the New York String Orchestra in Carnegie Hall.

Several of the pieces on the program represent an affectionate offering from the composers’ greatest works. The Siegfried Idyll was a birthday gift to serenade Wagner’s second wife, Cosima. A tender and intimate offering, the work reveals a gentleness in Wagner's personality that one rarely glimpses in his operas, and it has become his most popular instrumental composition. Lyric was written in 1941 as a memorial to George Walker’s grandmother. Walker later incorporated the movement into his First String Quartet, subtitled “Lyric.” Lyric remains his most frequently performed composition, and is often compared to Samuel Barber’s beloved Adagio for Strings (which was, coincidentally, drawn from Barber’s first string quartet). The concert ends with one of the most beloved works in the classical symphonic literature, Mozart's great G-minor Symphony. In this work, Mozart expands the emotional boundaries of the classical symphony by his very expressive, intensely personal musical language.

The concert is sponsored by Sage Physics & Engineering.