Special to the Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — Arrive early at the Sinfonietta Pops Orchestra concert “Where the Black Hawk Soars” and be one of the first 100 people to receive a free copy of this year’s “Big Read” book, “My Antonia.” The concert will be performed at 3 p.m. Sunday in the Hippodrome Theatre at the Scottish Rite Building, Eighth and Ohio streets in Terre Haute.
David G. Behrs, president of St. Mary-of-the-Woods College, will narrate the concert. Behrs began his tenure as the 15th president of St. Mary-of-the-Woods College on July 1, 2007, and is the first layman to be president of the College. A distinguished administrator, Behrs spent the past 25 years of his career in higher education and is respected as an expert in enrollment management.
The Sinfonietta will open the program with the “Overture to La Forza Del Destino (The Force of Destiny)” by Giuseppe Verdi from his opera of the same name. This music faithfully expresses the vitality and tension that characterized the westward expansion of North America by waves of European émigrés in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Scott Joplin composed some of his greatest works, including “The Entertainer,” after moving to St. Louis in 1900. Today, we would like to set the time and place around the turn of the 20th century by performing his music from the 1974 film “The Sting.” Antonin Dvorak’s original work, Symphony #9, subtitled the “New World Symphony,” emulates the indigenous styles of Negro and American folk music.
The orchestra will play “Largo” from the 9th Symphony.
Ferde Grofe composed the tone poem “Mississippi Suite” in 1925. Its four movements describe impressions of a journey down the Mississippi beginning with: “Father of Waters,” “Huckleberry Finn,” Old Creole Days,” and ending with “Mardi Gras.”
Because much of the Big Read Book “My Antonia” is set in the small Nebraska town of Black Hawk, the Robert W. Smith composition “Where the Black Hawk Soars” seems appropriate for today. Assistant Conductor Rodney Foster leads the orchestra in “Where the Black Hawk Soars” and also in W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”
Sinfonietta Music Director James N. Chesterson notes that the final number, “The Plow that Broke the Plains” by composer Virgil Thomson is a difficult and very impressionistic piece that was instrumental in the development of the “American Sound” in classical music. Commissioned for a documentary film about the “Dust Bowl,” the music is broken down into the following scenes: 1. Prelude, 2. Pastoral (the Grass), 3. Cattle, 4. Blues (Speculation), 5. Drought, and 6. Devastation.
