Musicians of all ages performing great music
2024-2025 Season
Em Português (In Portuguese)
Saturday, November 16th, 2024, 7:30 pm First United Methodist Church, 212 South Park Street
Kalamazoo, Michigan 49007
- Antônio Carlos Gomes: Overture to O Guarany
- Clarice Assad: Bonecos de Olinda
- Joly Braga Santos: Symphony No. 4
Heralded in his native land, but virtually unknown on these shores, is the music of Joly Braga Santos. His Fourth Symphony from 1950 is a significant and stirring work, the utterance of a composer enjoying true mastery of this most complicated of forms; based on his Portuguese publisher’s records, our performance of it will be the US premiere of this seminal piece. Combined with the Symphony are two shorter works written by composers from Brazil, a country profoundly affected by the legacy of Portuguese colonialism. The first is by Antônio Carlos Gomes, whose opera O Guarany – the overture to which we will perform – was called by his contemporary Giuseppe Verdi “pure musical genius.” The other is by living composer Clarice Assad, who sought, in her vivaciously rhythmic Bonecos de Olinda, to portray the particular traditions of parading puppet figures in the Carnaval celebrations of Northeastern Brazil.
War and Peace
Saturday, March 8th, 2025, 7:30 pm * Chenery Auditorium
- Sergei Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky Cantata (sung in Ukrainian)
- Vira Slywotzky, contralto soloist
- Andrew Koehler, conductor
- Ralph Vaughan Williams: Dona Nobis Pacem
- TBA, soloists
- Chris Ludwa, conductor
Presented in collaboration with Kalamazoo Choral Arts
The Philharmonia is thrilled to once again collaborate with the Kalamazoo Choral Arts Ensemble (formerly Bach Festival Chorus) and to perform in Kalamazoo’s most storied and acoustically ideal concert venue, Chenery Auditorium. In this performance, we will pursue two works with very different approaches to similar subject matter: Prokofiev’s thrilling film score about a medieval Prince of Novgorod who led his troops to fend off foreign invaders; and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s reflective and poignant plea for pacifism.
The Prokofiev was written for a propaganda film by Sergei Eisenstein which sought to valorize Alexander Nevsky, a real historical figure, by making him a proxy for Stalin on the eve of the German invasion of World War II. Our performance will feature a text newly translated into Ukrainian, helping draw attention to the fact that it is Ukraine that now must fend off invaders, but also to reclaim this figure of history, whom Russians imply is uniquely theirs but who in fact predated that empire by centuries and whose heroic legacy equally belongs with all Eastern Slavic peoples. Ralph Vaughan Williams, writing in an England still shattered by the effects of the First World War and fearing the stirrings of a second, combined Biblical verse and poetry by Walt Whitman to probe deeply into the senseless barbarity of war and the binds of our shared humanity. His plaintive warning went unheeded in 1936; would that we listen more closely today.
Copland at K
Saturday, May 31st, 2025, 7:30 pm * Kalamazoo College Light Fine Arts Building, Dalton Theatre
- Aaron Copland: An Outdoor Overture
- Philip Rugel: Concertino for Bassoon
- Jason Kramer, soloist
- Mary Watkins: “Soul of Remembrance” from 5 Movements in Color
- Andy Akiho: “In that Space, in that Time” from Structures
- Viet Cuong: Extra (ordinarily) Fancy
- Luke Conklin and Kaethe Durham, soloists
- Aaron Copland: Billy the Kid Suite
The Fine Arts Building in which we perform was opened in 1964, and the following academic year was a festival of the arts at Kalamazoo College. The capstone event of this year-long celebration was the visit of Aaron Copland to campus – in May of 1965, almost exactly 60 years before this concert’s date – to receive an honorary doctorate and to preside over performances of contemporary music, including his own. Accordingly, we’ll celebrate Copland with his music – the sunny Outdoor Overture and the epic ballet music to Billy the Kid – but also with the varied voices of several other American composers, contemporary to our present day: the ominous and obsessive strains of local composer Philip Rugel, the melancholy beauty of Mary Watkins, the frenetic energy of percussionist/composer Andy Akiho, and the cheeky, neo-Baroque high spirits of Viet Cuong. And in the process, we will feature some brilliant and virtuosic woodwind solo playing from within the orchestra (co-principal oboists Luke Conklin and Kaethe Durham) as well as from a guest soloist (K College instructor and bassoonist Jason Kramer).
Tickets to our fall and spring performances are available at the door, and cost $7 for general admission, $3 for students, and are free for students of Kalamazoo College. Tickets for our Chenery performance can be purchased in advance and are available through Kalamazoo Choral Arts.
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