Trumpet soloists James Thompson (above) and Douglas Prosser
By Eric Laprade
The Eastman Wind Orchestra, under the direction of Professor Mark Davis Scatterday, presents its third concert of the spring semester tonight, Friday, March 18, 2016 at 8 p.m. in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. The concert is free and open to the public.
The concert, presented in collaboration with the first annual Eastman Trumpet Festival, features multiple collaborations. The program will open with Patrick Harlin’s Rapture. A recipient of the Charles Ives Fellowship, Presser Award, and a Dow Sustainability Fellowship, Harlin has a unique interest in soundscape ecology and its relation to music composition. The composer, who has been in residency this past week and worked with the students of the Wind Orchestra, shares the following about Rapture:
I wanted to capture a blueprint that I think is a universal human experience: the onset of extreme emotion. Similar to extreme emotional states, musical elements in this piece start almost insignificantly and are magnified to their extremes, echoing throughout.
Composer Patrick Harlin’s Rapture will be performed by the Eastman Wind Orchestra tonight.
For the performance of Stephen Paulus’ Concerto for Two Trumpets, the Wind Orchestra will welcome Eastman School of Music Trumpet Professors Douglas Prosser and James Thompson as soloists. Prosser, currently principal trumpet of the Rochester Philharmonic, and Thompson, former Principal Trumpet of the Atlanta and Montreal Symphonies, have shared their artistry, talent, and insight with the Wind Orchestra students over the last two weeks of rehearsals. In the Paulus, the relationship between the two solo parts evolves throughout the concerto: the soloist parts either interweave to create a single melodic line, perform in in a call and response manner or a lyrical melody in the first solo part is harmonized by the second soloist.
A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Brian Shaw currently serves as Professor of Trumpet at Louisiana State University and principal trumpet of the Baton Rouge Symphony and Dallas Winds. Returning to his alma mater to perform Fisher Tull’s Rhapsody, Shaw offers the following insight about the work:
Fisher Tull’s Rhapsody for Trumpet and Band contains several contrasting sections of highly virtuosic passages for the trumpet soloist and ensemble. Soaring lyricism, especially in the solo trumpet part, characterizes each of the three richly scored lyrical sections, which surround two faster, more technically demanding portions of the work. The piece reaches its climax in the passage just before the cadenza, in which the trumpet reaches a high written A-flat.
Brian Shaw
The concert will close with Boris Kozhevnikov’s energetic Symphony No. 3, “Slavyanskaya”. John R. Bourgeois and The United States Marine Band discovered the symphony during their 1990 tour of the Soviet Union. While it was originally composed in 1958, the symphony was not heard in the United States until the last decade of the twentieth century. The nationalistic style, use of folk tunes, aggressive energy, and sweeping lyrical melodies provide a window into Russian cultural life in the 1950s.
The Eastman Wind Orchestra
Mark Davis Scatterday, conductor
Kevin Holzman and Eric Laprade, assistant conductors
Douglas Prosser, Brian Shaw and James Thompson, guest soloists
Friday, March 18, 2016
8 p.m.
Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre
Free and open to the public