If you ask our music director who his favorite composers are, he’ll likely hem and haw and be non-committal. But our November concert certainly include three of his top five favorites. Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides (Fingals Cave) is perhaps the finest example of a Romantic-era work depicting landscape. One can hear the waves, sea spray, and even imagine the basalt rock columns that reminded the composer of a pipe organ. Baritone James Bobick joins us to sing Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. These four orchestral songs stand on their own merit, but audiences may also hear that the melodies and orchestrations were source material for Mahler’s early symphonies. We end with a major staple of the symphonic repertoire, Sibelius’s grand and eloquent Symphony No. 2. The finale of the symphony was popular with the Finnish people as it was connected with the struggle for Finnish Independence, so much so that it was dubbed the “Symphony of Independence”. Written immediately after his popular Finlandia, Sibelius said of the work, “My second symphony is a confession of the soul.” 

Program:

• Felix Mendelssohn: Fingal’s Cave Overture (The Hebrides)
• Gustav Mahler: Songs of a Wayfarer, James Bobick, baritone
• Jean Sibelius: Symphony no. 2 in D Major, op. 43