Bold Beginnings

Get Tickets

Friday & Saturday, October 2 and 3 at 7:30 p.m.

At the Arkley Center for Performing Arts in downtown Eureka, 412 G St.

Eureka Symphony phone: (707) 845-3655

Sponsored by:

Carol Jacobson, Conductor and Artistic Director

The Eureka Symphony launches its 35th season with Bold Beginnings, a concert that sets the stage for an extraordinary season – bold, expressive, and full of life.

Under the direction of Conductor and Artistic Director Carol Jacobson, the program begins with Finlandia by Jean Sibelius – a powerful, stirring journey of Finnish national pride and defiance. Next, Ethel Smyth’s Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra offers a rare and compelling centerpiece, featuring violinist Terrie Baune and hornist Melissa Robinson-Winemiller in an inspired musical conversation between two virtuoso soloists. 

The evening closes with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, a symphony that personifies Beethoven’s emerging greatness. 

Tickets are from $21 to $54 and are available exclusively through the official website, www.EurekaSymphony.org, or by calling (707) 845-3655 for assistance. Be sure to purchase directly from us. There are active third-party scams.

Families are especially welcome: with every adult ticket purchased, two children under 12 are admitted free. Special rates are also available for student groups.

For those seeking last-minute deals, RUSH tickets will be available at the door after 6 p.m. on concert evenings for just $15—or only $10 with a valid student ID. These tickets offer the best seats available and are sold on a cash-only basis.

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“I’m thrilled to be presenting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 for the first time in Humboldt County. It’s a dazzling, exuberant work bursting with energy, humor, and audacious musical ideas that make it impossible to sit back and simply listen; this is Beethoven at his brilliant, irrepressible best.”

Carol Jacobson, Conductor and Artistic Director

Program

Finlandia                                                  

Jean Sibelius

Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra,

Ethel Smyth

Allegro moderato

Elegy ­­– In Memoriam

Finale

Intermission

Symphony No. 2  in D major opus 36,

Ludwig van Beethoven

Adagio – Allegro con brio

Larghetto

Scherzo – Allegro

Allegro molto

Artists

Thank you to our soloists sponsors – Jonathan & Erin Flyer

Terrie Baune, violin
Terrie’s Bio:

Terrie Baune, Violin, is concertmaster of the Eureka Symphony and the North State Symphony  and co-concertmaster of the Oakland-East Bay Symphony. She is a member of the professional new-music group Earplay and director of the Humboldt Chamber Music Workshop. Baune’s professional credits include four years as a member of the National Symphony of Washington, D.C. and two years as a member of the Auckland Philharmonia of New Zealand, where she also performed with the Gabrielli Trio, a New Zealand National Ensemble. She has held concertmaster positions with the Fresno Philharmonic, Santa Cruz Symphony, and Rohnert Park Symphony.

For over twenty years, she was concertmaster of the Women’s Philharmonic, during which time she participated in over a hundred premieres and made several recordings, including as soloist in the Maddalena Lombardini Violin Concerto No. 5. She premiered Chen Yi’s Chinese Folk Dance Suite for Violin and Orchestra, which was commissioned for her. Terrie has had solo pieces written for her by Richard Festinger, Ross Bauer, and many others. Most recently, she performed the world premiere of Libby Larsen’s violin concerto Dancing Man Rhapsody, a co-commission by the Eureka Symphony and the North State Symphony. 

Melissa Robinson-Winemiller
Melissa’s Bio:

Dr. Melissa Robinson-Winemiller, horn, earned her Master of Music from Yale and her Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Kansas and spent years as a French hornist and tenure-track professor. After leaving her academic career in 2016, she dedicated herself to the study of empathy and leadership, earning an MBA and MSDA while working as a consultant in the healthcare arena. Today she is an international bestselling author, a TEDx speaker, and a doctoral candidate finishing her second doctorate at Creighton University in Interdisciplinary Leadership. She still maintains a rich and varied performance career, however, and continues to bring her first love of music to students and listeners while also blending it into her keynote addresses at universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, and this June, Harvard.


“Smyth pulls out many cool techniques in the piece,” said Robinson-Winemiller. “There are the multi-phonics in the cadenza, but that’s only part of it. Plus, Terrie is such a phenomenal artist! Playing with her is a dream. I’ve been very fortunate to get to work with a lot of artists, but Terrie is top of the bunch. Getting to play the Smyth was her suggestion, and the second I knew I was going to get to play with Terrie I jumped on it.”

Melissa Robinson-Winemiller

To deepen enjoyment, Eureka Symphony offers two ways to prepare for the concert, Musical Notes and Live & Local Concert Previews. 

Musical Notes:

Come early for a free pre-concert talk, hosted by Concertmaster and soloist Terrie Baune and pianist John Chernoff with special guest Melissa Robinson-Winemiller. Learn about the music and the composers from 6:30-7:00 p.m., just before the concert. It lasts about half an hour, leaving you time to stretch your legs and find your assigned seat before the concert begins.
 
There is no assigned seating for these talks, so you can be as close to the stage as you wish or experiment by sitting in different sections of the beautiful Arkley Center for the Performing Arts.

Sponsored by Carol and Wayne Palmer.

Live and Local Concert Preview:

For an advance look at the program, attend Live & Local Concert Preview via Zoom on Monday, September 28, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. Hosted by Elizabeth Morrison with special guest Susie Smyth, great-grand-niece of composer Ethel Smyth. Live & Local is an OLLI Special Interest Group sponsored by the Eureka Symphony, and is free to OLLI members.

Sponsored by the Eureka Symphony.

Door-to-Door Shuttle:

Visit www.eurekasymphony.org/get-involved for details.

Shuttle Signup Form

Summary:

Elizabeth Morrison’s notes from our Playbill

The 35th Anniversary Season opens with Jean Sibelius’s tone poem Finlandia. This stirring piece has been a symbol of Finnish identity since its debut in 1899, at a time when the country’s independence as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire was under threat from Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. When the Tsar disbanded several progressive Finnish magazines, Sibelius joined other composers in so-called “Press Days,” ostensibly to raise money for the newly-unemployed writers. His contribution consisted of a series of tableaux vivants, “living pictures,” in which costumed performers posed to illustrate the music. His final tableau depicted a group of Finns surrounded by symbols of the country’s social and industrial progress, including a much-appreciated papier-mâché steam locomotive. Though clearly intended to stir national pride, the piece flew under the radar for a time, disguised with the bland title of Intermezzo. When it was safe to do so, Sibelius revised the music, balancing the musical turbulence of the opening with a serene hymn-like melody from the middle section that is known as the “Finlandia Hymn.” If it’s not the official national anthem (that honor belongs to Maamme, Finnish for “Our Land), it might as well be!

The composer of the next piece, Ethel Smyth, also wrote a famous anthem. Hers is called March of the Women,and is still known as a rallying cry of the British suffragist movement. But her brilliant Concerto for Violin, Horn and Orchestra, written in 1927, disappeared into obscurity for most of the twentieth century. She had taken several years off from composing to work with the suffragists, then returned to composing only to be interrupted by World War I, and, like Beethoven, to face deafness. Her concerto stares down these difficulties with impressive determination. 

The combination of violin and horn is unusual, to say the least. Its closest ancestor is the 1865 Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano, by Johannes Brahms. Smyth knew Brahms from her student days in Leipzig, and was a lifelong admirer. Closer at hand, she was inspired by two close friends: a charismatic Hungarian violin virtuoso named Jelly D’Arányi and the eminent English hornist Aubrey Brain. Brain had mastered a technique called multiphonics, whereby a single brass instrument can play chords. This impressed Smyth no end; she wrote several horn chords into the third-movement cadenza, the first time they were notated in a score.

The first movement, Allegro moderato, begins with an orchestral introduction. The solo violin enters with a lyrical melody, soon followed by the solo horn. Smyth highlights their sonorities against each other and the orchestra in a conversation to which each voice brings its best self. The second movement, Elegy (in memoriam)-Adagio, is even more lyrical. Smyth never put a name to her elegy, but there are hints, such as the instrument combination, an affinity of themes, and the year 1927, the 30th anniversary of his death, that she may was thinking of Brahms. In the third movement, Finale-allegro, Smyth, who famously loved to hunt, returns the horn to its roots as a hunting instrument, and pairs hunting calls with Bartók-like folk gestures in the violin. It’s exhilarating to hear Smyth kick over the traces of  late-Romantic lyricism for an adventurous movement that fully acknowledges the 20th century. 

The concert concludes with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D Major. The Second Symphony tends to be a bit overshadowed by the First and Third, but while transitional, it is in fact more forward-looking than one might think. Composed in 1802, it sees Beethoven at a critical moment. He was simultaneously struggling personally with his deafness and bursting with creativity; at once fearful of Napoleon’s grip on Europe and energized by his revolutionary ideas. In the midst of inner and outer struggles, Beethoven produced a symphony brimming with energy, humor and optimism. 

The first movement begins with a long Adagio introduction, with intense crescendos, grand fortissimos followed by sudden silences, and sweet bird calls from the flutes. At the end of the portentous introduction, the Allegro con brio section breaks out into cheerful optimism, using the full panoply of heroic gestures. The Larghetto second movement, one of his longest slow movements, has the intimacy of chamber music; Berlioz described it as a “delineation of innocent happiness.” The third movement is not the expected graceful minuet but an exuberant, outgoing scherzo whose humor comes from playful rhythms worthy of Haydn. The fourth movement, Allegro molto, full of energy and jokes, shares the scherzo’s joie de vivre. As Beethoven wrote to his friend Franz Wegeler,  “I will seize fate by the throat. It shall certainly never wholly overcome me.”