After two years away from performing, including a last-minute cancellation of the planned January 2022 concert due to the Omicron surge of the pandemic, the LSO is ready to share its music with the community on the evening of Friday, April 1.
Beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Hill Auditorium, the LSO will perform a free concert featuring one of the works originally scheduled for the January concert, and three others prepared since rehearsals restarted in early February. Under the baton of Yeo Ryeong Ahn, the Gilbert S. Omenn Music Director, and assistant conductor Leonard Bopp, the LSO will present a program with a decidedly Parisian feel. This is especially fitting given Ahn’s recent appearance as a competitor at the La Maestra competition for female conductors in Paris in early March.
The program will begin with Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony, No. 31 in D major, written when the composer was 22 and visiting Paris as he began to make his way as a mature composer rather than a wunderkind performer. It will be conducted by Bopp.
Next up will be Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement, featuring Xiaoya Liu playing this work written in 1934 by the first African-American female composer to have her works performed by major symphony orchestras.
The concert will conclude with two first movements from works by famous French composers: Claude Debussy’s La Mer, written in the first years of the 20th Century and evoking the sea from sunrise to midday, and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, written in 1828 to capture the obsessive love the composer felt for an Irish actress.
The LSO will require masks for all attending this performance, and asks the audience to show proof that they have completed the Responsiblue screening on their smartphone screen or a printout. No children under 3 will be admitted. Any updates regarding COVID-19 protocols will be posted on the LSO’s website and Facebook page by the morning of the performance date.
