4th grade: Civic Symphony field trip 2015

Tomorrow, the 4th graders will be attending the Civic Symphony of Green Bay's school concert. The program will include some shorter versions of full pieces, so I wanted to share some videos for each entire piece in case you are interested in hearing them again (perhaps at the night concert!). I've also included some brief background info about the pieces they'll be playing tomorrow morning.

And God Created Great Whales

This piece by American composer Alan Hovhaness uses pre-recorded sounds of whales in addition to the voices from the orchestra. The video is over 12 minutes in length; we'll do the entire piece at the evening concert, but it will be a shorter excerpt for the morning concert. This piece uses a technique where the players in the orchestra each get a short series of notes to play, but the composer asks them to play that series many times, and in overlapping rhythms.

"CATcerto"

In classical music a concerto is a piece that features a soloist, either an instrumentalist or singer, and they usually stand in front of the orchestra. In this piece, the CATcerto, our soloist is Nora the Piano Cat. The composer had a video of Nora playing, and has written the orchestral accompaniment to match the music that Nora created. Our conductor will be watching the video to match up the live music from the orchestra to the recorded piano music from the video. It is similar to how orchestras used to provide music for silent movies 100 years ago.

Die Fledermaus

Die Fledermaus is an overture by the composer Johann Strauss. This video is 9 minutes long - we will play the entire piece at the evening, but at the morning concert we'll do just a short bit of the introduction. It is approx. the first 30 seconds of this video.  "Fledermaus" translates to "The Bat". The piece is about a man who dresses up in a bat costume for costume party, he is mentioned through the operetta as "Dr. Bat" by his friends, who are making fun of him.

Peter and the Wolf

Peter is the star of our concert, and you will hear his adventures told through the sounds of the orchestra. Our narrator is Stuart Smith, who will tell the tale of Peter as he leaves his yard, goes into the more dangerous meadow and encounters a mean wolf. With the help of some animal friends (a bird, a duck and a cat) and some nearby hunters, Peter comes up with a clever solution to his problem where nobody gets hurt. The music is by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev.

During the evening concert, the Civic Symphony will also be performing movements from Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saens.