Premieres 14 October at 7:30 PM GMT
Available for 4 days
eso.co.uk/darktimes/
The English Symphony Orchestra continue their innovative series of online concerts with a new webstream on the 7th of October, 2022 which features the broadcast premiere of Steven R. Gerber’s suite Music in Dark Times, written in 2005 for Vladimir Ashkenazy and the San Francisco Symphony, who gave the first performances in March 2009.
Gerber’s 20-minute suite begins with a new orchestration of his “Fanfare for the Voice of America” which was commissioned by the USA’s international broadcaster, Voice of America, following the events of 9/11 in 2001. Gerber said of the Fanfare: “The title comes from the opening phrase in the trumpet, which spells out A-M-E-R-I-C-A… and the middle section is the first few notes of Yankee Doodle, which has been VOA’s theme song for most of its existence.” Other movements include a Pavane, inspired by a comment by Ashkenazy about the Fauré Pavane, a death dance in the form of a tarantella and a funeral march (Gerber called this movement “Dead March”). The work ends with an “Elegy for Strings” and a second, darker Fanfare, creating an arch-like form across the whole work.
“This is a compact, powerful work that really hits home,” say Kenneth Woods. “And it sadly seems more apropos than ever at the moment.”
In 2021, Kenneth Woods and the ESO released their first recording of Gerber’s music, including two Sinfonias for Strings and two Sinfoniettas for Orchestra. Fanfare Magazine called the recording “the perfect starting point for an appreciation of Steven R. Gerber’s gifts as a composer…Conductor Kenneth Woods leads the English String Orchestra and English Symphony Orchestra in propulsive, colorful, and nuanced accounts of the various works. The ensembles play with admirable precision and tonal richness."