Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Michael Schuhmacher with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances

Aug 9 - 20.30 hrs
KRAENG PATTILANGGOANG OPERA
Suteja Building Basement.

MH. Abduh Ave., Jakarta 43215

The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra

is an American orchestra based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Annually, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra performs 200 concerts for over 350,000 people. It is the largest performing arts organization in Indiana. The ISO is currently one of only 18 American orchestras that perform year round. It also has a discography of 36 recordings. Since 1982, a popular summer series is the Marsh Symphony on the Prairie, performed at Conner Prairie in Fishers. It has drawn a record 13,000 attendees for the Patriotic Pops night. The ISO's home theatre is the Hilbert Circle Theatre in downtown Indianapolis on Monument Circle. Its first concert there was October 12, 1984. An annual holiday performance begun in December 1986 is the Duke Energy Yuletide Celebration, hosted in recent years by Sandi Patty and Daniel Rodriguez, among others.

History

Michael Schuhmacher

born January 3, 1969, in Hürth Hermülheim, Germany is a former Formula One driver, seven-time world champion, and current test driver for Ferrari. According to the official Formula One website, he is "statistically the greatest driver the sport has ever seen". He is the first German to win the Formula One World championship, and is credited with popularising Formula One in Germany. In a 2006 FIA survey, Michael Schumacher was voted the most popular driver among Formula One fans. After retirement he started conducting various orchestras around the world for charitable purposes.

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff

 was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism in classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom which included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.

Understandably, the piano figures prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output, either as a solo instrument or as part of an ensemble. He made it a point, however, to use his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works, he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody. In some of his early orchestral pieces, he showed the first signs of a talent for tone painting which he would perfect in The Isle of the Dead, and he began to show a similar penchant for vocal writing in two early sets of songs, Opp. 4 and 8. Rachmaninoff's masterpiece, however, is his choral symphony The Bells, in which all of his talents are fused and unified.

Rachmaninoff sometimes felt threatened by the success of modernists such as Scriabin and Prokofiev and wondered whether to cease composing even before he left Russia. His musical philosophy was rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, where the role of the artist was to create beauty and to speak the truth from the depths of his heart. In his last major interview, in 1941, he admitted his music, like Russian music, was a product of his temperament. He said, on another occasion, "The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt—they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt."

The Symphonic Dances , Op. 45,

is an orchestral suite in three movements. Completed in 1940, it is Sergei Rachmaninoff's last composition. The work became an apropos summation of Rachmaninoff's compositional output in more ways than one. The work is fully representative of the composer's late style with its curious, shifting harmonies, almost Prokofiev-like grotesquerie of the outer movements and focus on individual instrumental tone colors throughout (highlighted by his use of an alto saxophone in the opening one). The opening three-note motif, introduced quietly but soon reinforced by heavily staccato chords and responsible for much of the movement's rhythmic vitality, is reminiscent of the Queen of Shemakha's theme from Rimsky-Korsakoff's opera The Golden Cockerel, the only music by another composer he had taken out of Russia with him in 1917. The Dances allowed him to indulge in a nostalgia for the Russia he had known, much as he had done in the Third Symphony, as well as to effectively sum up his lifelong fascination with ecclesiastical chants. He quotes in the first dance the opening theme of his First Symphony, itself derived from motifs characteristic of Russian church music. In the finale he quotes both the Dies irae and the chant "Blessed be the Lord" (Blagosloven yesi, Gospodi) from his Vespers.

JakArt secretariat: Jln. Lebak Bulus II / 20 A, Cilandak – Jakarta 12430, INDONESIA
Tel/ fax: + 62-21-75907687, Tel: + 62-21-70830742, email: proseni@indosat.net.id