BI-CO ORCHESTRA TO PERFORM BERLIOZ, STRAVINSKY
Student Concert Winner Randy Moon to Solo

On Friday, April 7, at 8 p.m., the Haverford/Bryn Mawr Orchestra, directed by Thomas Hong, will present its spring concert featuring the winner of the annual student concert competition, violinist Randy Moon, Haverford '08. On the program: Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, with Moon as soloist. The concert will be held on the Haverford College Campus in Roberts Hall, Marshall Auditorium. Parking is free in the visitors' parking lot, and the hall is wheelchair-accessible; the concert is free and open to the public.

The Symphonie Fantastique, perhaps Berlioz's best-known work, was the composer's breakthrough success when it premiered in 1830. Berlioz himself wrote the very colorful program notes for the performance, describing its inspiration:

"A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere."

The orchestra will then jump forward a century with the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, written in 1931. Moon, who will play the solo, writes in the program notes:

"Stravinsky, not a string player, was insecure about his ability to write for the violin, but his contemporary Paul Hindemith provided him confidence, telling Stravinsky that his unfamiliarity would be refreshing in a compositional sense. To help, the violinist Samuel Dushkin served as dedicatee and aide. 

"Each movement of the concerto starts with the same chord, about which Dushkin wrote:

During the winter [of 1930-31] I saw Stravinsky in Paris quite often. One day when we were lunching in a restaurant, Stravinsky took out a piece of paper and wrote down this chord and asked me if it could be played. I had never seen a chord with such an enormous stretch, from the 'E' to the top 'A,' and I said, 'No.' Stravinsky said sadly, 'Quel dommage' ('What a pity'). After I got home, I tried it, and, to my astonishment, I found that in that register, the stretch of the 11th was relatively easy to play, and the sound fascinated me. I telephoned Stravinsky at once to tell him that it could be done. When the concerto was finished, more than six months later, I understood his disappointment when I first said, 'No.' This chord, in a different dress, begins each of the four movements. Stravinsky himself calls it his 'passport' to that concerto."

<<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 4/6/2006

Next story>>