Coastal Symphony of Georgia Spring Concert

For the Coastal Symphony of Georgia's Spring concert, Music Director and Conductor Michelle Merrill brings us music of endurance and resilience.

Concert notes:

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The concert opens with Something for the Dark by Sarah Kirkland Snider. This piece was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony in 2016 as a result of her receiving the DSO Elaine Lebenbom Award for Female Composers in 2014. She says thinking about Detroit caused her to think about resilience – what it means to endure. The music opens with a bold statement of hope in the horns and trombones, then takes us through humbling passages to a delicate tune in flute, harp and celeste, and on to a testing tumult before finding a “kind of a clear-eyed serenity – maybe even the kind of hope that endures.” Flute Concerto in D Minor by Carl Reinecke follows. This was the last concerto Reinecke composed before his death in 1910.  A contemporary of Schuman, Reinecke shared his fondness for the Romantic Period.  The concerto will be performed by Les Roettges, the CSG’s Principal Flute Chair.  It allows the flutist to take center stage throughout while pairing with other orchestra members in a cheerful first movement, a slow dark second movement, and finally stirring the brass and strings into dramatic swells of harmony and texture that lead to a triumphant finale.The evening closes with Dimitri Shostakovich’s powerful and controversial Fifth Symphony. It was written at the height of Stalin’s purges: a time of death, fear, and artistic repression; and there is a constant sense of urgency, an overwhelming sadness to the music. The public heard the symphony as an expression of the suffering to which it had been subjected; the authorities claimed they found everything in the work they had demanded of Shostakovich.

The mission of The Coastal Symphony of Georgia is to engage, enrich, and inspire the community through artistically vibrant musical performances. For more information or to order season tickets, call 912.634.2006 or visit coastalsymphonyofgeorgia.org.