Sparkling Virtuosity

Sparkling Virtuosity Inna Faliks, piano Music of Rossini, Strauss, and Shostakovich Thursday, February 13, 2025, 7:30pm First Presbyterian Church The winter concert of the Chamber Orchestra of Sarasota bubbles with good humor. The featured work on the program is Dmitri Shostakovich’s brilliant Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor for piano, trumpet, and strings, performed by guest artist Inna Faliks. Full of jokes and parodies of the great classical masters like Haydn and Beethoven, this is a wonderfully boyish and light-hearted work that has retained a constant place in the concert repertoire, most of all for the infectious pleasure that it affords both to audiences and to performer.The trumpet soloist for the concerto will be Gianluca Farina. Shostakovich composed the concerto in 1933 when he was only 27 years old. He played the solo part himself at the premiere. Originally, he planned to write a trumpet concerto, then decided to add piano. Eventually the piano took over while the trumpet maintains a key role in the concerto. At the time he composed the work, Shostakovich was riding high: he had achieved international recognition with his first symphony, and just completed his new opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mitsensk District: The years of Stalinist repression were yet to come. “Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker), Ukrainian-born American pianist Inna Faliks has made a name for herself through her commanding performances of standard piano repertoire, as well genre-bending interdisciplinary projects, and inquisitive work with contemporary composers. After her acclaimed teenage debuts at the Gilmore Festival and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she has appeared on many of the world’s great stages in recital and with many major orchestras, performing with conductors Leonard Slatkin, Keith Lockhart and many others. Her recent seasons include performances at Ravinia Festival in Chicago, National Gallery in Washington DC, as soloist with US orchestras nation-wide, and repeated tours of all the major venues in China. GIOACHINO ROSSINI composed Sonata No. 1, in G Major in 1804, when he was only 12 years old. “Six dreadful sonatas composed by me at the country estate of my friend Agostino Triossi, when I was at a most infantile age, not even having taken a lesson in accompaniment, the whole composed and copied out in three days.” This delightful sonata is one of the earliest of his works to have survived and they have been in the repertoire ever since he wrote them.Emulating the easy-going spirit of the 18th century divertimento rather than that of the more serious string quartet, the young Rossini writes graceful, elegantly flowing lines mixed with jocular good humor. Other works on the concert include Gioachino Rossini’s Sonata for Strings in G Major, Johann Strauss Jr’s “Pizzicato Polka”, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Viennese Waltz King, and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in G Minor. Ms. Faliks will be the soloist for both piano concertos. Tickets for the concert are available online at (give URL). Adult tickets are $42. Student tickets are only $5.00. The 2024-25 season continues on March 20, 2025, with the Florida premiere of “Anne Frank’s Tree” by American composer Victoria Bond. Complete information about artists and programs can be found on the orchestra website at www.chamberorchestrasarasota.org. Program Sonata No. 1 in G Major Gioachino Rossini Concerto in G Minor for Piano and Strings Johann Sebastian Bach Pizzicato Polka Johann Strauss, Jr Concerto No. 1 in C Minor for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings Dmitri Shostakovich

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Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2886471-0

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