The Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra kicks off its 73rd year of entertaining and educating Texomans on Saturday, Sept. 21st. The concert, held at Memorial Auditorium at 1300 7th Street in downtown Wichita Falls, begins at 7:30 pm. Concertgoers are invited to join Maestro Fakhouri for a casual preconcert talk from the stage beginning at 6:45. The season opener will feature internationally-known pianist Joyce Yang in a performance of Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 3.” Yang, a native of South Korea, began taking piano lessons at the age of four. At eleven, she moved to the US to attend the pre-college program at the Juilliard School in 1997, where she graduated in 2010 with the special honor of being awarded Juilliard’s Arthur Rubinstein Prize.
Yang burst onto the international scene in 2005 when, at only 19, she won the Silver Medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. She was also recently featured on the classical music program “Performance Today,” which airs on Texoma’s public radio station, KCCU-FM.
Along with the Beethoven concerto, the Sept. 21st concert also features the overture to fellow German composer Carl Maria Von Weber’s “Der Freischütz.” The opera, Von Weber’s most famous work, is about two lovers whose ultimate fate is determined by supernatural forces. The program also features Antonin Dvorak, another German-born composer who, like most everyone during the Romantic Period, could not help but be influenced by Beethoven. Texomans will have the pleasure of hearing Dvorak’s “Symphony No. 8,” which was composed in 1889, just 4 years before he composed his famous last symphony subtitled “From the New World.”
It is an honor for the WFSO to have the opportunity to work with Yang, who has performed with such notable orchestras as the Chicago Symphony and the LA and BBC Philharmonics. She has also given solo recitals at New York City’s Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. This season she is traveling around the US and Canada performing twelve different piano concertos, as well as touring with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. She will be in Dallas for four nights performing Tchaikovsky’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” with the DSO on Oct. 10th-13th.
The 2019-2020 WFSO season, dubbed “Inside Symphonic Music,” will continue with “Classical Tales” on Nov. 16th, highlighting the music of Rossini, Mozart and Beethoven; “Home Alone in Concert” on Dec. 14th, which will be a similar experience to the recent “Pixar in Concert” in that it will meld together a live performance of John Williams’ score with a showing of the film on two big screens; a “Young People’s Concert” on Jan. 24th with “Peter and the Wolf”; the music of Bruckner, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky on Feb. 29th in “Russian Masterpieces”; and the season finale, “Brilliantly Orchestrated,” will include a world premiere of Fouad Fakhouri’s “Krupa,” along with the music of Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov. “Inside Symphonic Music” packs an orchestral punch with some of the most well-beloved Romantic concert favorites, fun for the family with “Home Alone” and “Peter and the Wolf,” and new music composed by the Maestro himself. For more information on the season,
call 940-723-6202 or visit wfso.org or Facebook.
– Dr. Todd Giles
