HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — Holland Symphony Orchestra’s return to indoor live music netted several standing ovations on Saturday evening.
HSO’s music director and conductor, Johannes Müller Stosch, said the evening’s theme, New Worlds, referenced more than the famed Antonín Leopold Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”
The theme encompassed the early work of Beethoven and the HSO’s first performance of a work by notable Black-American composer and conductor, William Grant Still Jr., “Darker America.”
Still’s name may not be well-known, but his work has been featured in major films, Müller Stosch said during a new element of the season, a YouTube pre-concert talk. Still produced a “masterful repertoire, and deserves a rightful place in the classical music canon,” Müller Stosch said.
Still, who died in 1978, is the first Black man to conduct a major American orchestra, leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1936; the first to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra (The Rochester Philharmonic, 1931); and the first to conduct an orchestra in United States’ deep south. He led the New Orleans Philharmonic in 1955.
The next HSO concert is set for 7:30 p.m. Oct. 16, 2021, in Hope College’s Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts’ concert hall. Masks are required.
The program will include Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha Suite; Nino Rota’s Divertimento Concertante for Double Bass and Orchestra; and Beethoven’s Symphony No.6 in F major, Op.68 “Pastorale.” Jack Unzicker will be featured on bass. Learn more at hollandsymphony.org.
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