The Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra (ESO) will present To A New World on Saturday, March 11, at 7 p.m. at ESO’s home venue, Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church. The program features classic works by Coleridge-Taylor, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky and includes guest musicians, cellist Jean Hatmaker and violinist Isabel Chen, the 2021 Stanger Young Artist Competition award recipient. The popular pre-concert lecture with Ted Hatmaker is back for this concert and will begin at 5:45 p.m.
What’s interesting about this concert
• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a British descendant of freed African-American slaves, was greatly inspired by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic The Song of Hiawatha and chose to set the poem to music in what became one of the composer’s most well-known pieces. Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha became so popular in Britain in the early 20th Century that it rivaled Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah!
• This concert features Isabel Chen, winner of the 2021 Stanger Competition, in a performance of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s (pronounced de-VOR-zhahk) Violin Concerto. The Dvořák Violin Concerto received its first U.S. performance in Chicago, just down the road at the Auditorium Theatre in 1891.
• Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 From The New World was written while the composer worked and toured the United States in 1893 — it was completed in fact in Spillville, Iowa. Inspired by African-American spirituals like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and Native American music, Dvořák commented: “The future music of [the United States] must be founded on what are called [Black] melodies… They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.”
What’s playing
The program includes: The Song of Hiawatha Overture, by Coleridge-Taylor; Violin Concerto I: Allegro ma non troppo by Dvořák; Pezzo capriccioso, by Tchaikovsky; and Symphony No. 9, From the New World, also by Dvořák.
Tickets and information
General admission tickets are $35 per person and reduced fare tickets for students and seniors are available online at ElmhurstSymphony.org/event/to-a-new-world.
