Haydn & Schoenberg
Inventing Genesis
~ Saturday, November 14 at 8:00 pm ~
Pre-concert talk at 7:00 pm
Single Ticket & Subscriptions Available!
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On November 14, 2009, Emmanuel Music, led by Acting Artistic Director John Harbison and Associate Conductor Michael Beattie, presents its first evening concert in a season featuring the music of Franz Joseph Haydn and Arnold Schoenberg.
This concert, titled Inventing Genesis, features Haydn’s masterpiece The Creation (Die Schöpfung) and Schoenberg’s Prelude Op.44 (Genesis). Both pieces express a deep, fervent, and unfashionable religious faith in indelible sounds.
Schoenberg composed his powerful “Prelude to the Bible” in 1944 as part of Genesis Suite, a group of pieces commissioned from seven different California émigré composers by Fred Astaire’s music director Nathaniel Shilkret. The piece premiered before a glittering Hollywood audience of the motion picture, concert music, and émigré intellectual elite. Schoenberg wrote a power-packed six minutes that sounds like a coiled release of energy and fantasy. He later said he wrote the central episode as a double fugue because “Creation must have been a complex achievement.”
Haydn composed his Creation in 1796 on a commission organized by a similar entrepreneur, Baron von Swieten, with twelve aristocratic donors paying for both the composition and a premiere before the elite of Viennese society. Haydn viewed The Creation as the great work of his career, and indeed he inhabits this Creation material with the most mature musical imagination. The oratorio’s admirable qualities - economy, wit, pictorialism, surprise, refreshment, simplicity, and daring – are the qualities it shares with any of Haydn’s great symphonies, quartets and trios.
Martin Marks, music historian at MIT whose specialty is film music, will present a pre-concert talk at 7 PM.
Schoenberg: Prelude, Op. 44 (Genesis)
Haydn: The Creation (Die Schöpfung)
Featured Musicians:
David Kravitz, Raphael
Kendra Colton, Gabriel
Matthew Anderson, Uriel
Kristen Watson, Eva
Mark McSweeney, Adam
The Orchestra and Chorus of Emmanuel Music
John Harbison, conductor
Tickets available: click here!
  
Emmanuel Music programs are supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Boston Cultural Council.
Emmanuel Music is the ensemble-in-residence at Emmanuel Church. |
