MMF: Festival Orchestra 3

Festival Orchestra with guest conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong and soloist Julian Rhee. “Igor on My Mind,” Allan Pollack’s fun-loving, energetic and rhythmic piece, impishly steals motifs straight out of Igor Stravinsky’s orchestral music. Then the real Stravinsky will be heard in the Violin Concerto in D, a neoclassical piece in four movements, written in the summer of 1931. It was used by George Balanchine as music for two ballets. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is one of the most-frequently played compositions in classical music, but after the familiar opening notes, it offers surprising new passages to the close listener. At the time he wrote it, Beethoven was becoming increasingly deaf and correspondingly interested in the music’s theme of heroic struggle.