The UTC Symphony Orchestra
The UTC Symphony Orchestra will present a fall concert, “Tchaikovsky and More”, in the Roland Hayes Concert Hall in the UTC Fine Arts Building on Sunday, Nov. 12, at 3 p.m.
Review for the performance:
This 65-member college/community orchestra includes university music majors and non-majors from UTC and Chattanooga State, UTC music faculty members, area music educators, and other talented amateur and professional musicians from the region.
The concert is free and includes Peter Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, in which he incorporated several Ukrainian folk tunes. Ukraine once was called “Little Russia”, hence the symphony’s nickname “The Little Russian”. The work was very successful from its first performance because of Tchaikovsky’s exciting development of the themes, and it won critical acclaim among Russia’s nationalistic composers known as “The Five”.
Also on the concert is the overture to Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco, his first widely acclaimed opera and one that chronicles the exile of the Jews from their homeland by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. A hauntingly beautiful work entitled Longing for Your Return by Steven Amundson, Professor of Music Theory and Conducting and Conductor of Orchestras at St. Olaf College, provides a respite between these powerful works.
The orchestra is conducted by Sandy Morris.