The Orchestra of Northern New York will present its spring concert, Visions & Reflections, on April 27 at 7:30 pm in Hosmer Hall, SUNY Potsdam, and on April 28 at 3 pm in the First Presbyterian Church, 403 Washington St., Watertown. Adrian Slywotzky, the second and final candidate for ONNY’s Music Director position, programmed the concert and will conduct the 56-piece orchestra.
Adrian Slywotzky is a prize winner of the Atlantic Coast International Conducting Competition (Portugal, 2016) and the Audite International Conducting Competition (Poland, 2017).
He was the founding conductor of the Yale Medical Symphony Orchestra, and from 2007 – 2010 music director of the New Haven Chamber Orchestra. Adrian has conducted Yale’s New Music Directions Ensemble. He has also served as Associate Conductor and Artist Advisor of the Boston Youth Symphony and as teaching fellow for the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra.
Adrian served as Associate Director of Orchestras at the University of Michigan from 2019 – 2022 and currently is Director of Orchestras at the Crane School of Music.
He holds degrees in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan and the Yale School of Music. As a violinist, he has participated in festivals including Tanglewood Music Center, California Summer Music, and the Norfolk Contemporary Music Festival. He earned a BA in architecture from Yale College and an MM in violin performance from the Yale School of Music.
The program opens with the Overture from The Abduction of the Seraglio by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Written in 1782, the Abduction from the Seraglio is a rescue opera in which the heroics of the rescuers are thwarted by the magnanimity of the chief villain. With its quasi-exotic orchestration (piccolo, triangle, big drum, and cymbals added to the standard combination), the Overture is in the old Italian style, notwithstanding that Mozart wrote Seraglio for the anti-Italian, German form of musical theater, the Singspiel.
The second work to be performed is Dolores White’s, “Crystal Gazing.” It is a meditative and mysterious piece that invites us to muse on both the visible and spiritual qualities of crystals. The Cleveland Chamber Symphony has many CDs and its “The New American Scene No. 2″ CD features the works of five outstanding African American composers, including White’s “Crystal Gazing”.
Next on the program is Le Tombeau de Couperin by Maurice Ravel. It pays tribute both to his Baroque predecessors and to friends he had lost in the First World War. Originally composed for piano, Ravel described the work as an homage “directed less in fact to Couperin himself than to French music of the 18th century.”
The concert culminates with the soaring and glorious Symphony No. 2 by Jean Sibelius. It is a four-movement work for orchestra written from 1901 to 1902 by Finland’s most accomplished composer. Sibelius himself referred to the piece as “a confession of the soul.” After sold-out performances in Helsinki, revisions were made, and the new piece premiered in 1903 in Stockholm. Composer, pianist, and music critic Oskar Merikanto exclaimed that it "exceeded even the highest expectations.”
For tickets, visit onny.org or call 315-212-3440.