Performance Overview

One of the most popular and well-attended events of the School of Music’s calendar is the performance by the winner of the annual Concerto Competition. Last year’s winner, bassoonist Baron Thor Young, promises to shine on this concert in Weber’s Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra.

Music Director Robert Franz also leads the orchestra in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which fairly whirls with rhythmic drive, vibrant energy and over-the-top exuberance. The composer’s contemporaries wondered: Was he drunk? Has he gone mad? Musicologist Ernest Newman thought the symphony revealed “a divine intoxication of the spirit,” and Wagner called it simply “the apotheosis of the dance itself.” Contemporary Native American composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate’s “Chokfi’” rounds out the program. “Chokfi’,” the Chickasaw word for rabbit, is presented as a character sketch of the trickster animal — an important figure in Southeast American Indian cultures. Different instruments and techniques represent the rabbit’s fiendish personality.