Friday & Saturday, April 10 & 11 at 7:30 p.m.

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

Eureka Symphony phone: (707) 845-3655

Please join us for a concert that celebrates the human spirit, a richly varied program that swings from lighthearted play to profound emotional depth.

The orchestra opens with Kabalevsky’s The Comedians Suite, a spirited work full of wit and charm, its theatrical flair guaranteed to bring a smile.

The mood turns deeply expressive with Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A Minor, performed by cellist Garrick Woods, whose soulful and sensitive artistry brings Schumann’s poetic voice to life.

The evening concludes with the Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s bold and vibrant Symphony No.1 in G Minor, a work brimming with the energy and optimism of one of Scandinavia’s great symphonists.

Curated by Carol Jacobson, the Eureka Symphony’s Conductor and Artistic Director, Humor, Passion and Power offers a rich and rewarding musical journey for all ages. “It touches all the bases” she says, “with such a varied palate no one will have a chance to be bored!”

Cello soloist Garrick Woods recently described the Schumann concerto by saying that, “The mood is varied between deeply sentimental and jubilant. Anything serious about it never gets lost in itself without finding some kind of balance to it.” He went on to add that “in recent years, the Eureka Symphony is creating very exciting programs that we on the stage are very proud of doing.”

Along with our spring concert, the Eureka Symphony and Humboldt County Office of Education invite students to a free, live symphony concert during their school day. This year, over 1200 students will enjoy selections from this concert (with extra surprises) on Thursday morning, April 9. For many, this will be their first encounter with the exhilarating sound of a full orchestra at the Arkley Center. Classrooms have been studying the music in advance to get the most out of it.

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 many 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.

“Live symphonic music is impossible to replicate, you must be present to experience the energy of the performers and the energy of the crowd. Yo-Yo Ma very recently said that music is energy and I really like that description, said Garrick. “The interaction of the instruments and the communicative element of it; there’s an intention behind every sound that is made.”

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Shuttle:

Reserve a seat by Wednesday, APRIL 8!

Concert attendees who may need assistance getting to the concert are encouraged to sign up for the Eureka Symphony’s new door-to-door Shuttle Program, a safe and easy way to get to and from the concerts. Follow the button below or call (707) 845-3655 for details. Last minute reservations will be subject to availability and we need to stay in touch if you sign up and your plans change.

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Musical Notes:

Enhance your enjoyment of Conductor Carol Jacobson’s musical selections with Musical Notes, free pre-concert talks at the Arkley at 6:30 p.m. before each concert. Hosted by Concertmaster Terrie Baune and pianist John Chernoff, often joined by special guests, the talks are an informal and informative way to learn about the composers and pieces to be played that evening. You’ll learn enthralling facts about the music and the era of each piece, and hear from guest artists who share their background and insights into the music they will perform.
 
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. Again, Musical Notes now begins at 6:30 p.m. and lasts about half an hour, leaving you time to stretch your legs and find your assigned seat before the concert begins.

Sponsored by Carol and Wayne Palmer.

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Concert Extras

To learn more about the concert in advance, join host Elizabeth Morrison on Zoom from 6:00-7:30 p.m. on April 6, (the Monday before the concert). For details visit “Live & Local Concert Preview”, a free OLLI Special Interest Group sponsored by the Eureka Symphony.

Summary

• When: Friday April 10, and Saturday April 11, 7:30 p.m.
• Where: Arkley Center for Performing Arts in Eureka (412 G St.)
• Musical Notes: 6:30 p.m.
• Tickets: $21-$56 purchase online
• Shuttle Sign Up Form
• Email: EurekaSymphony@gmail.com
• Phone: (707) 845-3655
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Poster

More about this concert from our Playbill…

The fourth concert of the season opens with The Comedians, a suite for orchestra by the prolific Soviet composer, conductor and pianist Dmitri Kabalevsky (1904-1987). Composed in 1938 and 1839, The Comedians is 15 minutes long and comprises ten lively movements as sparkling as spring sunshine. It started life as incidental music to a children’s play, by the Soviet writer Mark Daniel, called The Inventor and the Comedians, and went on to become one of Kabalevsky’s best-known works. The second-movement “Galop,” in particular, is the most famous minute and a half of his entire oeuvre. Daniel’s play, sadly lost to history, is said to have been about Johannes Gutenberg, the “inventor” of the title, and a group of traveling buffoons. It’s hard to picture, frankly, but whether or not you can pick out musical references to moveable type, the suite is full of deft, inventive charm. 

This cheerful wakeup call will be followed by one of the most beautiful pieces we will hear this season, the Cello Concerto in A minor, Opus 129, by Robert Schumann (1810-1856). This is an experience Schumann= himself did not have; his concerto was never performed in his lifetime, and did not receive its premiere until four years after his death. He wrote it in a two-week burst of creativity in 1850, when he had just taken up a position as Director of Music for the city of Dusseldorf. He was pleased with it, and his wife Clara praised its “romantic quality, vivacity, freshness and humor.” But Robert could not interest any cellist in giving a performance, and the manuscript was rejected by two publishers before being accepted without much enthusiasm by Breitkopf & Härtel. Schumann was correcting the proofs when he died at age 46; it is the last piece he saw all the way through to publication.

After the belated premiere it remained comparatively obscure until it was championed by Pablo Casals in the 1920s. The general reluctance to engage with Schumann’s beautiful work can seem puzzling today, when it has won a place in the heart of the romantic cello repertoire. But we can note how different it is from a classical-era cello concerto like Haydn’s Concertoin C Major from last season’s program. We recall the solo cello waiting out an extended introduction, then entering to converse with the orchestra, display its virtuosity and soulfulness, fulfill our harmonic expectations, and satisfy our sense of form. Schumann’s concerto is quite different, something he signaled from the start by calling it a “Konzertstück,” a concert piece, rather than a Konzert, a concerto. It opens with three evocative chords in the woodwinds (you may think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream), a fragment of rhythmic background from the violins, and then a surprise. In the fifth bar the solo cello enters with a lithe melody, very free and singing, lightly scored so the cello’s warm sound shines through. Though it is often described as introspective and contemplative, I think Clara was closer to the mark: it is indeed fresh, romantic and, yes, humorous. It might be a stretch to call it “jolly,” as Robert did while pitching it to his publisher, but it is open and welcoming throughout.

Schumann famously objected to applause during performance, and specified that the concerto’s three movements be played without pause. But you will certainly recognize the segue from the first to the second movement, a song without words of extraordinary beauty and intimacy. The solo cello is joined by a second cello from within the orchestra, a beautiful effect inspired by Clara, who used a solo cello from the orchestra in her piano concerto. (Brahms did something similar in his second piano concerto, but Clara did it first.) And speaking of Clara, listen for the figure of a falling fifth, Robert’s swooning sigh on her name, which you will hear often amidst the excitement of the energetic, and very virtuosic, third movement of this wonderfully imaginative piece.

The orchestra returns after intermission with the Symphony No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 7, by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931). Nielsen shares with Niels Gade, whose Symphony No. 3 in A minor we heard in 2023, the honor of being Denmark’s preeminent composer. Nielsen, a half-century younger, eclipsed Gade in his lifetime and is now the more famous of the two. Gade was a romantic composer with close ties to Mendelssohn; Nielsen’s works draw energy from nineteenth-century Danish nationalism, and is closer to the modernism of his exact contemporary Sibelius. He was born to a poor but musical family (he describes them in his autobiography as “peasants”) and learned violin from his father, a traditional musician, very early. He also recalls his mother singing folk songs to him. His parents, seeing no future for him in music, apprenticed him to a shopkeeper, but when that fell through he became a bugler and trombonist in the Sixteenth Battalion Army Band. Interestingly, he was sprung from the army after being presented to Gade, then the director of Royal Academy in Copenhagen. Nielsen was enrolled at the Academy and graduated in 1886, eventually securing a place in the second violin section of the Royal Danish Orchestra. If his education remained a bit sketchy, this turned out to be an advantage; he learned his craft from within the orchestra, following his own path to music of originality, rhythmic vitality and harmonic freedom.

He composed his first symphony between 1891 and 1892, and sat among the second violins at the premiere in 1894. Successful performances followed, and he was increasingly able to devote himself to composing.  He wrote six symphonies, and it is for them he is best-known outside of Denmark. Within his home country he is treasured for his folk songs and as an embodiment of Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the ugly duckling, the poor boy who passes through adversity, marches into Copenhagen and becomes the uncrowned King. His first symphony, in four movements, begins in G minor and ends in C major, a practice called “progressive tonality” that he and Mahler came to independently at around the same time. The first movement opens energetically, with a tempo marking of Allegro orgoglioso, an unusual marking that means “proudly.” There are sweeping chords from the strings, winds, horn and timpani, soon joined by the trombones. Proud writing indeed, from a composer who spent his youth in an army band. The second movement, marked andante, begins like a song, but soon turns into a fascinating journey of chromatic syncopation. The third movement is a slightly off-kilter scherzo on a modal melody, with a contrasting slower middle section. The Finale begins in C minor and returns to the mood of the opening, concluding, most proudly, with stirring C major chords. It is a fascinating work that well deserves to be heard.