HOT SPRINGS -- More than 100 young musicians will join 18 experienced musical mentors for an intensive two weeks of orchestral, chamber and solo music as the Hot Springs Music Festival's 20th season gets underway today.
The festival continues through June 13 at various Spa City venues. There's a ticket charge for most of the concerts, but admission to all rehearsals is free. Call (501) 623-4763 or visit hotmusic.org.
Things kick off with the festival's traditional free opening fanfare at 6:45 p.m. on the terrace of the Arlington Hotel, 239 Central Ave. This year's first notes will come from a piece titled Festival Fanfare by Fort Worth-based composer Sterling Procter, commissioned to mark the festival's 20th anniversary.
"Sterling and I have collaborated on a number of works and this remarkable piece will be a spectacular way to open this year's festival," says festival chorus director Lynn Payette, who commissioned the piece to be written not for chorus but for brass and percussion.
The festival is, in fact, not featuring a major choral-orchestral work this year, as it does most years. However, the chorus will join a chamber orchestra to perform George Frideric Handel's coronation anthem "The King Shall Rejoice," 7:30 p.m. June 9 at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, 228 Spring St. Bass mentor Kevin Mauldin will solo in the Double Bass Concerto in D major by Johann Baptist Vanhal; the program will also include the Overture to Gioacchino Rossini's opera La Scala di Seta and the Symphony No. 102 in B-flat major by Franz Josef Haydn. Tickets are $20.
And the chorus will perform three a cappella pieces at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, also at St. Luke's, as part of a "Mentor Chamber Concert," including two arrangements by Alice Parker to celebrate the noted composer-arranger's 90th birthday. Tickets are $10.
The festival's first full performance, 7.30 p.m. today in the Arlington Ballroom, will feature the Cavell Trio (festival mentor/teachers Shelly Myers, oboe; Osiris J. Molina, clarinet; and Jenny Mann, bassoon), the festival's ensemble in residence. Tickets are $15.
At 7:30 p.m. Monday, the festival's annual "Inside Looking Out" evening at First United Methodist Church Life Center, 218 Pratt St., will seat audience members in the midst of the orchestra as the players and music advisor/principal conductor Peter Bay read through some of the pieces they'll be playing over the next couple of weeks. Tickets are $10.
Viola mentor Amadi Azikiwe will be the soloist for Niccolo Paganini's Sonata per la Gran Viola e Orchestra, performed with the Festival Symphony Orchestra, 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Oaklawn School for Visual & Performing Arts, 301 Oaklawn St. The program will also include Javelin by Michael Torke; Menuet antique and Pavane for a Dead Princess by Maurice Ravel; and the Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky. Tickets are $20.
Suzanne Davidson, the festival's executive director, says this year's Bathhouse Row Progressive Concert, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 515-329 Central Ave., is moving from the sidewalk in front of the Ozark, Maurice and Hale bathhouses to the parkland behind them.
"The buildings will provide a buffer from the street noise," she says, and there are benches and other places to sit in the park, whereas patrons would have to stand on the sidewalk. The performers will include the Festival Trombone Choir (playing tunes by J.S. Bach and George Gershwin, among others) and harpist Shana Norton. Admission is free.
Myers, the festival's oboe mentor, will also be the soloist in L'horloge de flore (The Flower Clock) by John Francaix in the Festival Orchestra finale, 7:30 p.m. June 13 at the Oaklawn School for Visual & Performing Arts. The all-French program will also include Espana by Emmanuel Chabrier, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2. Tickets are $20.
Style on 05/31/2015