The first of two concerts celebrating Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th Anniversary, this program opens with the colorful music to his only full-length ballet and is followed by his equally colorful and buoyant Eighth Symphony. Wendy Warner will wow you with her performance of the cello concerto by Antonín Dvořák, who counted Beethoven as one of his main inspirations.
The Santa Fe Symphony
Wendy Warner, cello
Guillermo Figueroa, conductor
Beethoven
Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus
Beethoven
Symphony No. 8
Dvořák
Cello Concerto
Of Note
While not used specifically in the overture, Beethoven’s The Creatures of Prometheus, still firmly a classical-period work, is his only published piece that includes a harp. It also employs the basset horn, a smaller version of a bass clarinet, a fashionable woodwind instrument of the time.
Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony was not wildly received at its premiere in 1812, but later composers have raved about it, including Tchaikovsky, who said it was “one of [Beethoven’s] greatest symphonic masterpieces,” and Stravinsky, who said the work showed “incomparable instrumental thought.”
Dvořák’s mentor, Johannes Brahms, reportedly proclaimed of Dvořák’s cello concerto, “If I had known that it was possible to compose such a concerto for the cello, I would have tried it myself!”
Wendy Warner, cello
Cellist Wendy Warner soared to international attention in 1990, winning top prize at the International Rostropovich Cello Competition at age eighteen. Her career took off with concerts conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich and debuts in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Köln, Düsseldorf, Berlin and New York at Carnegie Hall. A Chicagoan from a musical family, Warner studied with Rostropovich at the Curtis Institute of Music from which she graduated.