On Saturday, April 7, 8pm, at the Bob Carr Theater (401 W Livingston Street, Orlando), the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra will premiere my Frontispiece on J.S. Bach’s Prelude in G major, a 4+-minute work that features as part of it J.S. Bach’s solo cello Prelude in G major. Music director Eric Jacobsen will play the featured cello part himself. The piece presents the prelude in its entirety at the center of it and is fully orchestrated, with countermelodies, and an introduction and closing based on the main Bach motive. The orchestra is the exact same instrumentation as Brahms’s Symphony #1: double winds, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings, with the added solo cello. The Bach Prelude exhibits that special magic that he’s so famous for amongst composers, particularly the outlining of chord structures and polyphonic lines within the solo cello part. He also, once G major is established, takes a kaleidoscopic detour away from the home key before returning to the spectacularly sunny opening motive. I tried to capture the various tonal worlds and motives that Bach crafts in the original and amplify them with my orchestration.
Click here for tickets.
Also on the program:
Brahms – Symphony No. 1 in C minor
Rimsky-Korsakov – Excerpts from Capriccio Espagnol
De Falla – Master Peter’s Puppet Show
Eric Jacobsen, conductor; Awet Andemicael, soprano; Alexander Elliot, baritone, William Ferguson, tenor; Kevork Mourad, visual artist