Click here to subscribe today or Login.
KINGSTON — Close your eyes during the concert, and you might imagine you’re at an old-time fox hunt — or that rockets are being launched.
“The French horns play this lilting march,” Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic conductor Larry Loh said, describing part of Mozart’s Symphony No. 29. “It’s a very high register for the horns and there is just this excitement because of the range they’re playing.”
The Philharmonic offers “Bach, Mozart and Barber,” its third Masterworks Concert of the season, at 8 tonight, March 6, in a new venue, the Kirby Center for Creative Arts at Wyoming Seminary in Kingston.
The program will culminate with Mozart’s symphony, during which those horns might seem to summon you to a sampling of the dramatic and stormy “Sturm-und-Drang” effect Mozart admired in compositions by his friend and idol Joseph Haydn.
“You’ll hear that especially in the last movement,” Loh said. “It sounds like rockets taking off.”
Earlier in the evening, the string instruments will be the star of the show.
Describing Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis as “ethereal,” Loh said the string musicians will be divided physically into three separate sections. Their music will overlap, he said, “sometimes separate, sometimes together, sometimes playing in layers. At times you’ll hear an antiphonal effect, back and forth, like a call and response.”
The strings also will shine in Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a piece that was used in the films “Platoon” and “Elephant Man.”
“It’s a very emotional, sort of heart-wrenching, beautiful piece of music,” the conductor said.
Rounding out the program will be Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, which Loh described as “a great way to hear the incredible talent we have in our orchestra.”