Season Debut! The most famous four notes in music – plus, Awadagin Pratt plays Florence Price
A trumpet fanfare rings across an empty stage. Musicians enter one by one, playing complementary motives which layer and intertwine to form Corigliano’s celebratory Promenade Overture. In this dramatic fashion, the Orchestra returns to the Civic Center stage for a triumphant and thrilling Season Debut. Celebrated pianist Awadagin Pratt joins the Symphony to perform Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement, a lyrical and lively piece which evokes Price’s experiences as a Black woman raised in the post-Civil War South. Equal parts mysterious and heroic, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture depicts the victory over oppression of Goethe’s tragic hero. Beethoven’s ominous four-note opening motif, often considered the musical manifestation of “fate knocking at the door,” opens his gripping, impassioned Fifth Symphony. Hear the raw power and the dramatic triumph of this masterpiece.