The Black Hills Symphony Orchestra kicks off its season Oct. 19 at the Performing Arts Center in Rapid City.
From bassoons to Bridgerton to Beethoven, the season features five performances between October and April.
Bruce Knowles, the orchestra's musical director gives a preview.
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The following transcript was auto generated and edited for clarity.
Bruce Knowles:
We're opening with a marvelous concert that features our orchestra musicians. There's not a soloist on this one. I like to feature just the symphony and what I felt this year, we're ready to tackle the famous piece by Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade.
Scheherazade, of course, is very, very famous for the violin cadenzas in it, which is going to feature our concertmaster, Amanda Swartz but it also features extensive solos from all the section principles of the orchestra. So we get to spread all of that wealth around and so the orchestra gets featured. So we're really, really pleased to be able to present that piece of music.
Krystal Miga:
And that one is called Myth and Magic? is that the first show? And that date is October 19th?
Bruce Knowles:
Right. Yes.
Krystal Miga:
So let's move on to Bassoon it will be Christmas. Tell me about that one.
Bruce Knowles:
So this concert features a bassoon soloist and this is a person named Chuck Ullery who is retired from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra as principal bassoonist, there for many, many years. And he's doing the Carl Maria von Weber Concerto for bassoon and I thought, well, why should this one bassoonist get all the attention on this concert?
So I have found an arrangement of kind of a Christmas collage of very virtuosic, incidentally, music for bassoon trio, arranged by Stevenson. And so our bassoon section will be featured on this. Our soloist will also be participating on this as well. I think we're gonna have a good time with it. Traditionally, our December concert is a Christmas concert, so I thought 'well, I'm going to mix a lot of classical things in with this that have some sort of loose relevance to it, too.'
We're going to open with the Marriage of Figaro. There was an old movie called Trading Places, which took place at Christmas time—kind of an off-color Christmas movie. So, there's, you know, some loose things in with some of these classical selections as well, but it's a lot of fun.
One of the centerpieces is a piece called Christmas Carol Symphony by a English composer, Patrick Stafford, who is not well known in this country. And so, we did a marvelous setting of Christmas carols in kind of symphonic setting, which I think the audience is really going to enjoy as well. A lot of variety in this one, you're going to get definitely get your festive music with this one too but with it with a classical slant to it.
Krystal Miga:
All right, so then this is the one I really want to talk to you about. It's the Regency and Revelry. Tell me about that one.
Bruce Knowles:
Yeah, well, it's all about the Bridgerton is what this is about. I really like a challenge in programming, so I thought, well, a lot of players have been out. You have to go, okay, and do some music, Bridgerton and all of this. Okay, you know, we can we can find some string quartet music and double up some parts and do some of this Vitamin String Quartet stuff in there and we so I found some nice arrangements of those out there. But really I thought to myself you know, maybe we should actually played music that people in the Regency era, you know, would have been listening to, right?
Krystal Miga:
Because in the movie, or the movie, the TV show. They've got, like you said Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift and all sorts of modern contemporary artists.
Bruce Knowles:
Yeah, there's a lot of actually excellent incidental music in this is well, that that I found by Kris Bowers who did a lot of just the main theme and some of the other incidental music to it, too. But so we found some other music too from approximately that time frame or Bridgerton and then the Queen Charlotte, which is the prequel I believe to this too.
And you know, so we have Haydn in there, who, in England was immensely popular at the end of the 18th century and a little bit of Handel, which is kind of a carryover from the Georges, right. And George III is involved in this and all that we won't get into that. So there's a lot of music, classical music featured in there too. So we pulled some of that out of there. So once again, you're going to get a really nice comparison contrast mix of classical and some popular music as well. So there's something for everybody in that one.
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March's concert spotlights the Young Artist Competition winner as a soloist and the Dakota Choral Union, which features opera choruses for that show.
The final season performance in April—Beethoven's Emperor Concerto—features pianist Anton Nel.