October 25-26
MADE OF STARS
Saturday | 10.26.19 | 8:00 PM
St. Paul's Church, 315 West 22nd Street
The Chelsea Symphony presents “Made of Stars” as its chamber concert series on October 25-26 during the fourteenth season, RISE UP. Featured on this program are Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and Jessie Montgomery’s piece with “explosive verve,” Starburst.
TCS members are featured in works in the first half: Twilight Song, a world premiere work by TCS resident composer and founding member Aaron Dai, opens both concerts. Friday’s concert presents hornist Peter DelGrosso on Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto and TCS is thrilled to welcome back Jason Smoller as English horn soloist on Jennifer Higdon’s Soliloquy. On Saturday’s concert, bassoonist Tilden Marbit is the featured performer on Weber’s Andante & Rondo Ongarese and Adam Schommer solos on the second horn concerto by Franz Joseph Haydn, a jaunty and lively work with a contrasting melancholic Adagio second movement.
Starburst by Jessie Montgomery was commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and premiered in 2012. Packing a big punch in just three and a half minutes, it “reflects today’s fashionable motoric, pop-oriented, post-minimalist style, albeit with memorable melodies, structural discipline, and not one cliché in the book.”
The “Jupiter” Symphony was as ‘of its time’ as Starburst is of our time, the longest and last symphony of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Of the celebrated last movement, renowned music historian Sir George Grove noted, "it is for the finale that Mozart has reserved all the resources of his science, and all the power, which no one seems to have possessed to the same degree with himself, of concealing that science, and making it the vehicle for music as pleasing as it is learned. Nowhere has he achieved more."
Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, an astronomer at Northwestern University, said, “science is very useful for finding our place in the universe.” It should be said that music is very useful for finding our place in our world.
Premium unassigned seating tickets available now on Eventbrite!
General admission seating available at the door for a suggested donation.
Concert run time: 80-85 minutes including a 15-minute intermission
Know before you go
Jessie Montgomery, “Conjuring Memories,” New Music Box (2016)
Program
Twilight Song
(World Premiere)
Soliloquy for English Horn and Orchestra
(Friday 10/25 only)
Concerto No. 4 in E-flat Major, K.495
(Friday 10/25 only)
Andante & Rondo ongarese, J.158, op. 35
(Saturday 10/26 only)
Concerto No. 2 in D Major, Hob.Viid:4
(Saturday 10/26 only)
Starburst
Symphony No. 41 in C major, K.551 "Jupiter"
Featured Artists
Adam Schommer is a freelance horn player in the New York metropolitan area. He serves as adjunct faculty teaching horn at Lehman College and Nyack College. Mr. Schommer has appeared with the Allentown Symphony Orchestra, Albany Symphony, New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, Bronx Opera Company, United States Military Academy West Point Band, Opera Company of the Highlands, Hudson Opera Theatre, New Rochelle Opera, New Jersey Association of Verismo Opera, and Orchestra of the Bronx. Mr. Schommer has had …
Tilden Marbit, a native New Yorker, started his musical training on piano when he was four. Later accepted into LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts for piano, Tilden was required to choose an orchestral instrument other than the piano. He never dreamed that the bassoon would soon consume his world. Tilden was accepted into McGill University’s School of Music as one of its first Schulich Scholars. He studied under the aegis of Stephane Levesque, principal bassoon of the Montreal …
Enjoying his work as a bright and energetic musician, Peter DelGrosso has found home as a horn player, educator, and composer/arranger in New York City. As a performer he has traveled through China as principal horn of The Philadelphia Festival Orchestra, to Saas-Fee, Switzerland as the horn player for the Talis Festival & Academy, and as a member and arranger for groups playing in Stockholm, Sweden and Cartagena, Columbia. Most recently Peter was a guest artist and brass clinician for …
Jason Smoller maintains an active freelance performance career in New York City, where he plays regularly with the Handel Festival Orchestra, The Chelsea Symphony, and the Greenwich Village Orchestra. In 2017, he gave the New York Premiere of the English Horn Concerto by Peteris Vasks with The Chelsea Symphony.
In addition to concerts in many of New York’s most iconic venues, including Carnegie Hall and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he has appeared with orchestras around the United …
A graduate of Columbia University and the Mannes School of Music, Aaron Dai began studying piano at the age of five and went on to win the UNICEF Youth Concerts Competition three times by the age of fifteen. As a soloist and collaborative pianist, he has performed around the country and abroad, in New York venues such as Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall, Symphony Space, and The Town Hall, and cities including Dublin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and San Francisco. …
Conductor
Reuben Blundell has been a Chelsea Symphony conductor/violinist since 2012, enjoying collaborations with musicians, soloists, composers and other conductors. Conducting Aaron Dai’s The Night Before Christmas, first with B. D. Wong then Annie Golden narrating, he initiated, conducted and edited (in Premiere Pro) the orchestra’s 2020 remote performance, narrated by John Lithgow.
Blundell is Music Director of the Riverside Orchestra on the Upper West Side, rehearsing Mondays and performing five concerts each season. He also directs another outstanding community …
Mark Seto leads a wide-ranging musical life as a conductor, scholar, teacher, and violinist. He is Artistic Director and Conductor of The Chelsea Symphony in New York City, and Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Brown University, where he directs the Brown University Orchestra and teaches courses in music history, theory, and conducting. Highlights of his 2023-24 season include performances with violinist Itzhak Perlman, violinist Randall Goosby, and clarinetist Anthony McGill, and the inauguration of The …