Posted February 27, 2020
DAYTON, OH (February 26, 2020) – On Friday, March 27, 2020 and Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 8:00 pm in the Mead Theatre of the Schuster Center, Artistic Director and Conductor Neal Gittleman and the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra will present the sixth concert of the 2019–2020 Masterworks Series, Alpine Symphony. The Masterworks Series Sponsor for the 2019-2020 Season of Titans is the Dayton Philharmonic Volunteer Association. The Saturday, March 28 presentation of this concert is the William S. Anderson Endowed Concert for the 2019-2020 Season.
To say that this concert will be powerful is an understatement. There is the emotional power of Symphony: This Will Be Our Reply and the sheer WOW factor of Strauss’s massive tone poem, An Alpine Symphony.
After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Leonard Bernstein gave an eloquent response to this unspeakable tragedy. “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before”—the inspiration for Lucas Richman’s work and our musical reply to the senseless carnage in the Oregon District on August 4, 2019. The piece can serve as a musical reply to tragedy in general, and in these performances, we also hold in our thoughts our friends and neighbors who suffered from the devastating Memorial Day 2019 tornadoes. The Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra Chorus, under the direction of Hank Dahlman, joins the Orchestra for this moving work.
When Neal begins the second half of our concert with An Alpine Symphony, you’ll immediately notice that the Schuster stage is crowded! Nearly 100 musicians on (and some off-) stage playing not just “regulation” instruments, but also wind and thunder machines, cow bells, and bird calls in Strauss’s orchestral extravaganza. Strauss fits a 24-hour hike up and down a Bavarian mountain into 45 minutes of colorful music, with a brilliant sunrise, an arduous ascent, a mountain pasture, a ferocious storm, a towering glacier, a beautiful sunset, and more. Supertitles will be your GPS on this musical journey!
Tickets for Alpine Symphony begin at $12 and are available at Ticket Center Stage (937) 228-3630 or online at www.daytonperformingarts.org. Senior, teacher and student discounts are available at the box office. For more information or to order subscriptions, including flexible subscription types that include performances by Dayton Philharmonic, Dayton Opera and Dayton Ballet, visit www.daytonperformingarts.org.
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About the Dayton Performing Arts Alliance
The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance was formed in July 2012 as the result of a groundbreaking and innovative merger between the Dayton Ballet, the Dayton Opera, and the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra. Together, they are the largest performing arts organization in the community, offering a tremendous variety of performance and education programs and setting a new standard for artistic excellence. Dayton Performing Arts Alliance performances are made possible in part by Montgomery County and Culture Works, the single largest source of community funds for the arts and culture in the Miami Valley. The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance also receives partial funding from the Ohio Arts Council, a state agency created to foster and encourage the development of the arts and to preserve Ohio’s cultural heritage. Funding from the Ohio Arts Council is an investment of state tax dollars that promotes economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohio residents. In 2013, The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance was thrilled to be one of five performing arts organizations in the country selected to receive a three-year “Music Alive” grant from New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras. The Dayton Performing Arts Alliance is the proud recipient of a 2017-2018 Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.