RI Philharmonic Orchestra concert, April 7

RI Philharmonic Orchestra presents Romeo & Juliet Suites with conductor Jacomo Bairos, April 7

Violinist Alexi Kenney performs Korngold’s Violin Concerto

PROVIDENCE, RI—The Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra & Music School welcomes guest conductor Jacomo Bairos to The VETS stage for Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Suite Nos.1 & 2, Rogerson’s Luminosity, Marquez’s Danzón No.2 and Korngold’s Violin Concerto, featuring soloist Alexi Kenney on violin. The TACO Classical concert is Saturday, April 7, at 8:00pm. The Open Rehearsal is on Friday, April 6, 5:30pm.

“We are pleased to introduce conductor Jacomo Bairos and violinist Alexi Kenney to Rhode Island audiences. As the award-winning music director of the Amarillo Symphony, and co-founder of Miami’s hybrid Nu Deco Ensemble, Jacomo is known for his ability to craft compelling musical and multi-media experiences,” said David Beauchesne, executive director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra & Music School. “We’re happy to welcome Jacomo and Alexi to The VETS to explore Prokofiev, Rogerson, Korngold and Marquez. We’re also thrilled to be near the end of our Music Director search season, and look forward to making an announcement in the near future.”

***At A Glance ***

Romeo & Juliet

TACO Classic Concert

Saturday, April 7, 8:00pm

The VETS, One Avenue of the Arts, Providence

Jacomo Bairos, guest conductor

Alexi Kenney, violin

ROGERSON: Luminosity

PROKOFIEV: Romeo and Juliet, Suite Nos.1 & 2

KORNGOLD: Violin Concerto

MARQUEZ: Danzón No.2

Tickets start at $15 (including all fees), and can be purchased online at tickets.riphil.org, in person from the RI Philharmonic Orchestra Box Office in East Providence, or by phone 401.248.7000 (M-F 9am-4:30pm). On day of concerts, tickets are also available at The VETS Box Office (Friday, 3:30pm–showtime; Saturday, 4:00pm-showtime). Discounts are available for groups of 10 or more.

Open Rehearsal

Friday, April 6, at 5:30pm

General Admission is $15. Tickets are available at tickets.riphil.org or 401.248.7000 (M-F 9:00am-4:30pm)

About Jacomo Bairos, guest conductor

“Bairos conducts with every fiber of his being…. His delight in being on the podium is palpable.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“Genuine talent.”—Atlanta Constitution Journal

“Splendid sense of musicality.”—Knoxville Mercury

JACOMO BAIROS, guest conductor

Jacomo Bairos, known for his energetic leadership and dynamic artistry, is the Amarillo Symphony’s 17th music director. Since 2013, under his direction, the Amarillo Symphony has grown artistically and, for the first time in decades, boasts sell-out performances. He also has established the Symphony’s first-ever Composer-in-Residence program. Along with composer Sam Hyken, Bairos co-founded Nu Deco Ensemble, an eclectic and virtuosic chamber orchestra reimagined for the 21st-century. He is currently its artistic director.

With education and outreach as core tenets of his work, Bairos and the Amarillo Symphony have introduced Class Act, a music education program. Along with routinely coaching the Amarillo Youth Orchestras and the Greater Miami Youth Symphony, Bairos leads interactive programs and concerts for SymphonyKids, Nu Deco’s Imagine Series and Carnegie Hall’s Link-Up.

He is the former associate conductor for the Charlotte Symphony. His musical mentors include conductors Gustav Meier, Robert Spano and Kurt Masur. After participating in the 2012 Kurt Masur Conductors Seminar in New York City—where he shared the podium with Maestro Masur in concert—Bairos was awarded the prestigious Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Scholarship by the US Mendelssohn Foundation and Kurt Masur. Bairos has traveled to Germany to conduct concerts with the Leipzig Symphony Orchestra and has assisted at the Gewandhaus Orchestra. A graduate of Peabody Conservatory’s distinguished Orchestral Conducting Program and the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen (2010 and 2012), Bairos has also worked with Jorma Panula, Marin Alsop, Hugh Wolff and Larry Rachleff.

As an accomplished and award-winning tubist, Bairos has given master classes and performed with festivals and orchestras throughout the world. At age 18, he was the first tubist in the history of the Aspen Music Festival to win the festival-wide concerto competition. Bairos has performed, toured and recorded with the New York Philharmonic, and the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Cincinnati and Seattle. He has held principal positions with orchestras in America, Spain and China, and was principal tuba for the Singapore Symphony Orchestra from 2004-2007.

About Alexi Kenney, violinist

“A talent to watch. …Architect's eye for structure and space and a tone that ranges from the achingly fragile to full-bodied robustness.”—New York Times

ALEXI KENNEY, violin

Alexi Kenney is the recipient of a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant. His win at the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Competition at the age of 19 led to a critically acclaimed Carnegie Hall debut recital at Weill Hall. Chamber music has continued to be his focus—touring with Musicians from Marlboro, Ravinia's Steans Institute and regularly performing at festivals including ChamberFest Cleveland, Festival Napa Valley, the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, the Marlboro Music Festival, Music@Menlo, Open Chamber Music at Prussia Cove (UK), Ravinia and Yellow Barn. He has collaborated with artists including Pamela Frank, Miriam Fried, Steven Isserlis, Kim Kashkashian, Gidon Kremer and Christian Tetzlaff, and is a new member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's CMS 2 program beginning in the 2018-19 season.

Kenney holds a Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he is currently completing his Artist Diploma as a student of Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried. Previous teachers include Wei He, Jenny Rudin and Natasha Fong.

About the concert: stories behind the music

Chris Rogerson

Luminosity

A refreshing talent: Chris Rogerson (1988-) has been hailed by The New York Times as a “confident new musical voice,” and by the Washington Post as a “fully-grown composing talent.” Indeed, from a distinguished musical education at the Curtis Institute of Music, Yale School of Music and Princeton University, Rogerson, in 2012, has been honored with the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has won numerous awards including the Aaron Copland Award.

Backstory: Luminosity was commissioned by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. It has been performed by the Atlanta and Grand Rapids symphony orchestras and the Bach Festival Orchestra.

Listen for this: A sprightly four minutes, Rogerson’s work unleashes daring virtuosity with remarkable orchestral colors. He employs modest forces but maximizes the orchestra’s sound palette through unique uses of percussion, accompaniment figures and dynamic contrasts.

Sergei Prokofiev

Romeo and Juliet: Suite Nos.1 & 2

A rocky launch: In 1934, the Kirov Theater in Leningrad suggested to Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) that he compose a full-length ballet to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The confused and frustrating history of this great ballet started right then. As it turned out, the Kirov company backed out of its arrangement with the composer, and he signed a contract with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. However, after hearing the first version of the music to Romeo and Juliet, the Bolshoi declared it “undanceable” and nullified its agreement with Prokofiev.

At that point, Prokofiev decided to salvage what music he could and set about extracting the two Romeo and Juliet suites, which premiered in 1936 and 1937. Eventually, the complete ballet was produced in 1938—but in Brno, Czechoslovakia, not in Russia. Two seasons later, the Kirov Theater presented the Russian premiere.

Sequence still works: The movements of Romeo and Juliet Suites 1 and 2 are not in the order they appear in the complete ballet. However, the movements selected for this program restore some semblance of the story. The Montagues and the Capulets present a stamping main section with a contrasting middle that gently portrays Juliet.

Listen for this: The Minuet marks the arrival of guests for the ballroom scene. The Madrigal is a dialogue between the two lovers, as is the famous nocturnal balcony scene of the Romeo and Juliet movement. Dance of the Girls with Lilies is performed by instruments softly muted so as not to wake the sleeping Juliet.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op.35

Not just a Hollywood composer: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) is well-known to classic movie buffs as the composer of scores to such adventure films as Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk. At one time, Korngold held an honored position in European opera and concert music and was considered a wunderkind. He composed his first major work, the pantomime ballet Der Schneemann, at the age of 11 and went on to write a series of successful operas, culminating in Die tote Stadt, completed when he was only 23. Korngold got involved in Hollywood film scoring in 1934, and for a film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he adapted the music of Mendelssohn. He went on to compose a string of 18 original film scores—most of them swashbucklers.

Returning to his roots: His scores for films were closely aligned with the Viennese operatic stage from which Korngold had come, and his late Romantic, Wagner-cum-Straussian style fit them perfectly. Ten years before his death, Korngold abandoned film, when he discovered that his reputation in that field had damaged his image among American concert-music critics. With focused energy, he plunged into serious composition, producing over the next few years the Violin Concerto in D Major (1947), a symphony (1950) and several other works.

Listen for this: In the first movement, notice the frequent changes of tempo, texture and mood—as in an emotional movie scene. Near the end of the movement, when the violin soloist has finished playing the unaccompanied section (called the cadenza), the first theme takes on the magnificent character of a classic movie’s “big theme.”

The finale is a jig, showing off the composer’s full range of brilliance in composing for the orchestra. Are you reminded of main title music at the opening of a classic film—particularly when the horns take up the principal theme? After the violin soloist chews up this theme by reworking it extensively, does the full-orchestra ending seem like the concerto is the sound track for rolling the end titles?

Arturo Márquez

Danzón No.2

Celebrated composer: Arturo Márquez (1950- ) was born in Alamos Sonora, Mexico. Beginning his musical training at the age of 16, he later attended Mexico City’s Conservatory of Music and the Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico. Continuing his development as a composer, Márquez went to Paris, where he worked with Jacques Castérède. At the California Institute of the Arts, Márquez studied with Morton Subotnik and Mel Powell.

Overwhelmingly received: In 1994, the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico performed a new work by Márquez, the Danzón No.2. The audience was so enthusiastic, it demanded an encore. Commissioned in 1994 by the Filarmónica de la UNAM in Mexico City, Danzón No.2 has been performed many times in the United States.

Listen for this: This music is irresistible with its combination of long, elegant melodies and its spiky montuno rhythms.