Sat 1/19 @ 8PM
Concert cancelled due to weather.
Guest conductor Benjamin Zander, music director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, will step up to the podium to lead the next Akron Symphony concert at E.J. Thomas Hall. He’ll be taking the orchestra and audience on a trip far away and long ago: Russian from the mid 19th century through its immediate post-revolutionary years.
The program opens in 1842, with the overture to the opera Ruslan i Ludmila, composed by Mikhail Glinka. It then jumps to the early 20th century with Sergei Prokofiev’s 1921 Piano Concerto No. 3, by which time Prokofiev had left his native country and was living in Paris; he debuted the work with the Chicago Symphony, playing the piano himself. In Akron, the solo part will be played by Tbilisi, Georgia-born pianist Alexander Korsantia who is currently based in Boston after living in Canada for two decades.
Finally, the program closes with Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s dramatic, emotion Symphony No. 4 aka “Fate,” written in 1878.
Doors open at 6:30pm, and Maestro Zander will talk about the program in “A Preview from the Podium” a 7pm. Tickets start at $25.
University of Akron, Akron, OH 44304