THE MUSIC

The evening opens at sea, with Richard Wagner’s Flying Dutchman Overture, music born from a real, harrowing experience. In 1839, a broke and desperate Wagner fled creditors in Riga by boarding a ship for Paris, a journey that should have taken eight days but stretched into three
storm-tossed weeks through the Norwegian fjords. He later said that ordeal gave the old legend of a ghost captain cursed to sail forever its “distinctive, strange coloring.” Wagner leans on churning strings and a fierce battery of brass to conjure the storm itself, trombones and tuba growling beneath a string section pushed to its most turbulent.

From that storm, the program brings us ashore, to right here. Elizabeth Kelly’s Coastal Concerto receives its world premiere tonight, the first time this music has ever been heard by any audience, anywhere. Kelly isn’t a stranger to this coast: during the pandemic, she partnered directly with this orchestra to teach music composition to Glynn County schoolchildren, using variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing. More
recently, Kelly toured the Georgia coastline with local environmentalists and consulted with local African American and Gullah Geechee musicians, to gather themes and inspiration for her concerto, which will later be adapted for use in schools and community gatherings.

The program’s final word belongs to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Tchaikovsky’s symphony opens with its “fate” motif carried by low clarinets alone, a hushed, ominous color that the full orchestra ultimately transforms into a blazing, brass-and-timpani march by the finale. Famous and financially secure when he wrote it in 1888, Tchaikovsky was nonetheless privately
convinced he’d run out of ideas.