Bainbridge Symphony Orchestra's 35th Anniversary Season opening concerts on November 10 & 11, 2007

Bainbridge Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director David Upham

In opening its 35th Anniversary Season on November 10 & 11, the Bainbridge Symphony Orchestra will celebrate its musical heritage in a program entitled “Viennese Classics.” When selecting this repertoire, Music Director David Upham chose to focus on the great musical capital city by programming works by composers who were either born, or who lived and worked in Vienna .

The first half of the program will feature the great Eighth Symphony of Franz Schubert, subtitled “The Unfinished.” Schubert, a native Viennese, apparently held very high standards for himself and never felt this symphony worthy of completion, much less publication. After beginning work on the third movement, Schubert abruptly halted composition and placed the only two completed movements in a desk drawer. Forty years after that, and long after the composer’s death, this masterwork was finally premiered only when Schubert’s brilliance as a composer of symphonies and large-scale works was starting to become widely-known.

Following intermission, the symphony program continues with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Divertimento in D Major for string orchestra. The youthful Mozart left his family and birthplace in Salzburg in 1781 to pursue his fortunes in Vienna . Well over 100 years later the famous German composer, Richard Strauss, would also leave his home to take a post directing the Vienna Court Opera. As a young man, Richard Strauss composed works for wind instruments that hearkened back to the suites and divertimenti of Mozart’s era. The wind section of the Bainbridge Orchestra will perform the Praeludium from the composer’s early Suite in Bb Major for Winds.

Finally, no celebration of Vienna would be complete without works from the other Strauss’s – the “waltzing Johann’s!” The program will conclude with Johann Strauss, Jr.’s set of waltzes entitled Tales from the Vienna Woods, followed by the most popular work of his father – Johann Strauss, Sr.’s Radetzky March. So break out the schnitzel and sachertorte, and join us.

Bainbridge Symphony Orchestra appears Saturday, November 10 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, November 11 at 3:00 p.m. at Bainbridge Performing Arts (BPA). A pre-concert chat precedes the performances at 6:45 p.m. on Saturday and at 2:15 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets: $15 for adults, and $10 for seniors, military, and youth, are available at BPA, 200 Madison Avenue North , Bainbridge Island , or by phone at 206.842.8569.