Northwest Sinfonietta: French Connections
$25-$45
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Symphony No. 31 in D K. 297 "Paris"
Gabriel Fauré — Requiem in D minor Op. 48
David Lockington, principal artistic partner
Freddie Coleman, choral artistic director
Jennifer Bromagen, soprano
Damien Geter, bass-baritone
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Symphony No. 31 in D major, K. 297 "Paris"
Maurice Ravel – Le Tombeau de Couperin
Gabriel Fauré – Requiem in D minor, Op. 48
Join Northwest Sinfonietta in opening the 28th season of music, and welcoming Maestro David Lockington in his first appearance as the orchestra's Principal Artistic Partner.
The Sinfonietta continues its ongoing partnership with the Seattle Choral Company, presenting Faure's heavenly, uplifting Requiem in an intimate setting orchestrated by John Rutter, as originally conceived by the composer. Of his seminal work, Faure wrote that "Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest."
The performance opens with Mozart's lively "Paris" Symphony. While his trip to the French capitol at just 22 years old failed to yield new employment for the young composer, it did result in this magnificent work using more instruments than ever before- including Mozart's first symphony to feature the clarinet. It can be heard as a musical bridge from his early symphonic writing to the robust, complex styles of his later works for full orchestra.
To round out this musical Tour de France, Le Tombeau de Couperin pays hommage to the famed Baroque composer Francois Couperin by one of the finest craftsmen of French classical music, Maurice Ravel. Each movement of the tombeau (a musical term from early French music meaning "written as a memorial") is dedicated to one of Ravel's musical colleagues who lost their life fighting in World War I. While the subject may imply a sadness for death and the horrors of war, each movement is light-hearted and ponderous, with Ravel commenting that "The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence."
This concert takes place as the world approaches the 350th anniversary of Couperin's birth in Paris in 1668, and the hundred year anniversary of the end of World War I in November 2018.