Santa Rosa Symphony presents a virtual concert featuring Dvorak's Czech Suite

January 27, 2021

Santa Rosa Symphony presents a virtual concert experience filled with love and life on Sunday, February 28, 2021 at 3 PM on its YouTube channel. SRS @ Home Feb 28, conducted by Francesco Lecce-Chong, features Antonín Dvořák's Czech Suite for Small Orchestra and Richard Wagner’s Siegfired Idyll for Small Orchestra, and works by William Grant Still and the Symphony’s SRS @ Home Artistic Partner and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

Music Director Francesco Lecce-Chong says, "Our February concert explores the gorgeous, rich sounds of 19th century Romanticism with works by Dvořák and Wagner - and their influence today. Although both composers are most well-known for their large-scale symphonies and operas, we will be featuring deeply personal and intimate works by them: Dvorak's ode to his homeland and Wagner's love letter to his wife."

Recorded on February 13 in Green Music Center's Weill Hall, the concert premieres February 28 at 3 PM, preceded by a live pre-concert talk at 2 PM and followed by a live post-concert Q&A with Lecce-Chong—all on YouTube. All three elements of this event are free, though donations to support the ongoing music and outreach programs of the Symphony are gratefully accepted during the event.

In Dvořák's Czech Suite for Small Orchestra, the composer embraces his heritage, incorporating Czech dance rhythms from Bohemia and Moravia, including a milder precursor to the Polish polka. The work was composed and premiered in the spring of 1879.

Wagner wrote Siegfried Idyll for Small Orchestra as a surprise Christmas and birthday gift for his wife Cosima, who was awakened at dawn on Christmas day in 1870 to a 13-piece ensemble performing it on the stairs outside her bedroom. The work is a very personal love letter filled with tenderness.

William Grant Still, a prolific African-American composer who broke many racial barriers in his lifetime, received a citation for Outstanding Service to American Music from the National Association for American Composers and Conductors in 1949. He was the first African American to accomplish the following:

  • Symphony performed by major orchestra (Afro-American Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, 1931)
  • Opera produced by a major company (New York City Opera, Troubled Island, 1949)
  • Conducted a major orchestra (Los Angeles Philharmonic, 1936)
  • Opera televised on a national network (A Bayou Legend, 1981)

Originally conceived as a cello concerto, Still’s Serenade is filled with expressive melodies and lush textures.

Zwilich became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1983 and composed her multi-textured Prologue and Variations for String Orchestra later that same year. The work, according to Zwilich, “celebrates the special sonorities, character and expressiveness of the string orchestra.”