Evento

Orchestra Seattle | Seattle Chamber Singers: Love + Adoration

Clinton Smith, conductor
Roxanna Patterson, viola

Wagner: Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
Duruflé: Ubi caritas, Op. 10, No. 1
J.S. Bach: O Jesu Christ mein's lebens Licht, BWV 118
R. Strauss: Serenade in E-flat, Op. 7
Monteverdi: Toccata from L'Orfeo
Sams: Rhapsody for Viola and Orchestra (World Premiere)
Mealor: She Walks in Beauty
Ravel: Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chloé

Clinton Smith's inaugural concert as OSSCS music director explores "love and adoration" in music spanning the centuries. The opening and closing pages of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde are, Clinton notes, "full of longing, rapture, anxious sighs, hopes and fears, laments and wishes, all things we experience when we fall in love." Maurice Duruflé's setting of Ubi caritas begins with the timeless words "where charity and love are, God is there."

Clinton has chosen to begin and end the season with a Bach motet "to honor the history of OSSCS's championing of Bach's music." This funeral motet "fits beautifully with our concert theme: in death, we offer up our greatest admiration and adoring thoughts of our loved ones." The wind serenade by 17-year-old Richard Strauss pays homage to his father, a virtuoso horn player, while demonstrating the young composer's love for the music of Mozart.

In keeping with another OSSCS tradition, we premiere a new work by Carol Sams, a longtime friend of OSSCS and of George Shangrow. The family of Jim Lurie, an OSSCS violinist and violist, commissioned it as a birthday gift to Jim; violist Roxanna Patterson, another dear friend of OSSCS (and of George) takes the solo role. Welsh composer Paul Mealor's setting of Lord Byron's famous "She Walks in Beauty" speaks of a woman's stunning beauty.