Attending A Local Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra Concert

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For my first required concert performance in this course, I decided to attend a local Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra concert. The concert was held September 26, 2015 at 7:30 pm in the Tilson Auditorium located on the Indiana State University campus. The musical program for the evening was a presentation of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” and Sibelius’ “Concerto in D minor for Violin and Orchestra, op 47” with guest violinist Ariel Horowitz. The opening piece was “Overture to Zampa” by Louis Herold.
The pieces that were performed this evening came from a mix of genres. “Overture to Zampa” is an instrumental piece from an opera while the other two pieces were symphonic pieces. All of the composers can be considered to be from the Romantic era but they all came from different times of the era. Herold would have been composing during the late classical/early romantic eras alongside composers like Schubert and Mozart. Dvorak on the other hand would have been composing during the late portion of the era with composers such as Tchaikovsky and Grieg. Finally Sibelius would have been active at the very end of the romantic era/very beginning of the 20th century classical period. He would have been active along with DeBussy and Richard Strauss.
The programs for this performance contained some interesting information on the composers that were being played along with their pieces. It also contained background information on the Symphony itself, the conductor David Bowden, the soloist and gave the names of all the members of the Symphony. The program notes contained a lot of descriptive information on each of the pieces. The Herold piece description included the fact that even though it is of darker subject material Zampa is considered to be...

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...ably Native American in sound.
The audience for this concert was a very diverse mix. There were older people dressed to the nines, younger people who were obviously students, and people in between the two. We were also joined by the Linda Luebke Strings Festival participants, one of whom was my eldest daughter who is a viola player locally. For the most part the audience was totally enthralled by the performance and well behaved with the exception of one young gentleman who apparently was feeling very ill. I was very nervous about going to the concert and concerned I would feel out of place but, I was happily surprised that once the music started I felt very much at ease. I thoroughly enjoyed the performance and, with my husband, decided that even after this class ends we are going to make it a point to continue attending these performances as often as we are able.

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