Look at what you missed???

The October concert was a BLAST.
Thomas Bacon played so movingly and with such feeling in the first half that some of the audience were moved to tears.And the horn players in the audience held their breath.
As for the St Hubert Mass...here is a taste of what happened

A short video from last night's performance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqsr0r3_ht8&feature=youtu.be

Jason had the horns face the altar, as is traditional for this piece. Having the bells of 26 horns facing you and playing is something you don't forget. Well done to Dr Marty Wheeler Burnett for holding her own on the Trinity Cathedral organ.

First Rehearsal

The first rehearsal for the St Hubert Mass was fantastic...16 horns ranging in age and ability from High School to Omaha Symphony. Next rehearsal tonight (Friday) and twice the number should turn up. This is the Massed Horns of Nebraska! And they sound great.

Not only a Horn player

Those of you who enjoy our Artistic Director's pre-concert talks might like to know that he will be giving the pre-concert talks before the Symphony Orchestra Master Works series until Christmas. Different subjects...same Jason.

The first concert of the season

And what a concert! We are presenting the St Hubert's Mass...the Huntsman's Mass for Organ and Horns. Jason will not say how many horns but at the moment it is a number between 18 and 25.Thomas Bacon will be guest Horn player and Marty Burnett will be playing the magnificent organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. There is a saying in church music that " the organ always wins". This time we shall see.

Whoops

The last concert of the season will be on June 5th, not the 3rd, which is what it says on the side panel on the left of this message.
Sorry

Message from Jason

In June Omaha Consort continues its cycle of nonets featuring the finest examples of the genre.  Last season we presented the nonet that started it, Louis Spohr's 1813 Nonet.  In the concert we performed Joseph Rheinberger's Nonet, composed in 1885.  Both were Omaha premieres of these masterpieces.

In our upcoming nonet program, Dressed to the Nines, we present the missing link, which connects the Spohr and Rheinberger.  While residing in Vienna Franz Lachner, a friend of Schubert, discovered Spohr's Nonet and in 1857 he composed his own after moving to Munich.  Lachner's brilliant composition student, Rheinberger, was then exposed to the genre.  Lachner's Nonet is essentially an early Romantic symphony for nine players.  It features beautiful writing for the winds and lush harmonies in the strings.  A century following the Lachner Nonet comes the 1959 Nonet of Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinu.  The work was composed in his final year of life and came as the composer was dying from cancer.  It is a colorful neoclassical work that was commissioned to celebrate the 35th year of the Czech Nonet, a group of nine musicians founded after resurrecting the Spohr Nonet from complete obscurity and exploring the powerful genre.  The nonet is truly a "symphony of nine".

Along with the Omaha premieres of the Lachner and Martinu there is also a world premiere of Phill Smith's Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, a work featuring the typical nonet scoring of violin, viola, cello, bass, and wind quintet plus electric guitar!  Composer and guitarist, Phill Smith,  will join musicians of Omaha Symphony to present a full spectrum look at the growth of the nonet over three centuries.

Everyone got the joke

Mozart was a practical joker and he wrote his “joke” composition to sound as if the musicians had never seen the music before and would never be asked back to play again. Now everyone knows that the best humor sounds effortless and that this can only be achieved by people that are talented and very experienced. Last night the Omaha Consort nailed it. The musicians, with smiles on their faces, took the audience on a wild ride through dissonances, musical clichés and random tempo changes, all interspersed with passages of lyrical beauty when they got it “right”.

It was an “insider” joke by a musical genius, and the audience loved it.