At 3 PM on Sunday, April 23rd, 2023 at the Hayti Heritage Center, the Durham Symphony Orchestra and Maestro William Henry Curry will present an exciting program of four world premieres by North Carolina composers. Featured soloists will be LaToya Lain (soprano) and Maria Serkin (horn). Though representing a wide variety of styles, moods, and genres, each of these post-pandemic premieres grapples in its own way with darkness and moves toward spiritual resilience and resurgence.
The program will open with the winning work from the Durham Symphony’s first Young Composers Competition—this year based on the theme of resurgence and drawn from a talented pool of Duke University students taught by Stephen Jaffe. Tears in Rain, by Josué Collado Fregoso, is a sonic reflection on the transitory nature of moments, sounds, relationships, and (mainly) human lives. The piece is about loss, mourning, and the transcendence of death–focusing on both the spiritual plane and the process leading to acceptance and to healing the emptiness of those left behind.
Our next premiere (featuring soprano soloist LaToya Lain) is Signs and Seasons–Five Orchestral Songs (Opus 2, 2021) by John Shields Caldwell—who is also the DSO’s principal bassoonist! Composed during the COVID-19 pandemic years 2020-22, the texts look back to poems Caldwell had written over forty-some years. These five songs, dedicated to his father, John Roy Caldwell (1935-2020), speak about signs, both earthly and heavenly. Above all, they reflect the love of music, nature, and astronomy that Caldwell’s father had instilled in him from childhood.
This season, for the first time in its history, the DSO has created the post of composer-in-residence—held currently by Richard Drehoff Jr., artistic co-director of earspace (a nationally known contemporary music ensemble). Drehoff played a crucial role in helping Maestro Curry adjudicate the winners of this year’s composition contest, and we are proud to feature his own new composition Every Night a Dream Visits Us. Based on the macabre and fantastical expressionist drawing of the same title by Alfred Kubin, Drehoff’s work explores the spirit of the image, but in music’s time-based form. This allows him to extend Kubin’s experiment, exploring the implications of subjective time and creating sharp juxtapositions of moments that evoke imaginary states.
The program will conclude with Terry Mizesko’s magnificent Tribute: Suite for Horn and Strings,featuringhorn soloist Maria Serkin. The commissioners of the work write that the “tribute” of the title is manifold: “to the horn, to the music, to the composer, and to the performer.” The work was created as an homage to the majestic sound of the French Horn and in honor of NC Hornist Andrew McAfee and his great-great uncle, Cleland McAfee (1866-1944)—the renowned American theologian, minister, and hymn writer who composed “Near to the Heart of God.” Indeed, Movement IV (“Lament”) concludes with a beautiful version of the hymn itself, which Cleland McAfee composed after the deaths of his two young nieces from diphtheria. In Mizesko’s setting, the hymn also memorializes the death of Andrew’s youngest brother in childhood.
As a whole, the work reflects Terry Mizesko’s love of Romantic and Post-Romantic composers and his belief that the horn “is the most expressive and lyrical of the brass family”—a quality showcased strongly in Movement II (“Highland Air”). But Mizesko’s tribute is not couched “in any specific style or form,” he writes, “but rather in tone and use of melody and harmony. Even then,” he says, “I stray occasionally into different waters.”
Please join us for what Maestro Curry calls “the birth of four sonic universes,” assisted by the remarkable artistry of our guest artists and Durham’s own “people’s orchestra.”
Location: Hayti Heritage Center, 804 Old Fayetteville Street, Durham, NC 27701
Tickets:
Children 12 and under, free
$10 for Students with ID
$30 for Adults
For additional information, email office@durhamsymphony.org
To minimize exposure to COVID-19 for patrons, artists, staff, and volunteers, we strongly encourage the wearing of masks to cover the nose and mouth.