Conducting Electricity

I’ve been in New York for the past week, auditioning singers for an opera and conducting at the Juilliard School. The city is gearing up for the holidays, with enticing displays appearing in the grand shop fronts of Fifth Avenue, and a sickly stream of canned musak beginning to percolate every public space. Thankfully our musical offerings at the Jacksonville Symphony will be rather more diverse, with Holiday Pops in December, our annual performances of The Nutcracker and The Messiah, and a glamorous New Year’s Eve concert conducted by Steven Reineke. I’m also delighted to see opera return to our stage with next weekend’s performances of Humperdinck’s fairy tale masterpiece, Hansel and Gretel. Engelbert Humperdinck is known today almost exclusively for his opera from 1893.

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The season is underway, and we’re getting ready for a weekend of concerts that feature a piece especially close to my heart. I doubt many of you know it since it’s rarely played outside the British Isles, yet it contains music that offers some of the concert hall’s deepest spiritual experiences. I’d like to spend this column telling you a little about Elgar’s masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius. Edward Elgar was the first great English composer since Henry Purcell. Almost two hundred years elapsed between their births, causing Germans to refer to England as “The Land Without Music”. Born in 1857, we often associate Elgar with his Pomp and Circumstances marches and all things imperial. Yet he was anything but the quintessential Edwardian gentleman. He

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