• Our Next Concert
    Three ‘B’s

    Sunday, May 4, 2014

    Barber

    Bruch

    Beethoven

    with Sang Mee Lee, violin

     

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  • Conductor
    of the Year

    The Illinois Council of Orchestra announced that Maestro Lawrence Eckerling received its 2014 Conductor of the Year Award in the Community Orchestra category for his work with the Evanston Symphony Orchestra. Attend our May 4th concert to witness the ICO award presentation.

     

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  • ESO’s
    Share The Stage

    Share the Stage lets you sponsor a chair in the Orchestra. It’s our way of recognizing that the ESO Community is made up of Orchestra Members and Supporters.

     

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2013–2014 CONCERT SERIES: CELEBRATE EVANSTON!

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Musical Insights

Free Pre-Concert Preview Series!

Enhance your concert experience with a sneak preview — Composers come alive and their passions take center stage when ESO General Manager David Ellis and ESO Maestro Lawrence Eckerling take you on an insider’s tour of the history and highlights behind the music.

Meet our soloist, Sang Mee Lee, at Musical Insights. She and our Maestro Lawrence Eckerling and David Ellis will explore the May concert program in depth.

Friday, May 4 at 1:30 pm,
North Shore Retirement Hotel
1611 Chicago Avenue, Evanston.
FREE and open to the public.

“Behind the Scenes” at our May Concert by Maestro Eckerling

I recently saw on Facebook a question posed…If you could sit down for an hour to talk with someone, past or present, who would you choose to talk to? My reply was “Beethoven.” Obviously, that isn’t possible. While I surely would love to know the details surrounding his metronome markings in his symphonies (and it’s something we likely will never know), he did leave some unique information which can be seen as documentation that we don’t have with many other composers.

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ESO Music Director Named Illinois ‘Conductor of the Year’

The Illinois Council of Orchestras (ICO) has named Evanston Symphony Orchestra Music Director Lawrence Eckerling its 2014 Conductor of the Year.

“The following criteria were used in the competitive evaluation for Conductor of the Year: innovation in programming and soloist selection, personal involvement in community, relationship with musicians and board and quality of performances,” said Gregory Clemons, director, ICO awards program. “Maestro Eckerling was deemed by the committee to have the highest level achievement in each of these areas.”

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Beethoven’s Heroic ‘Eroica’

The Third Symphony by Beethoven is one of the most famous and radical works of art ever created. It was “one of the turning points in musical history,” according to Harold Schoenberg, one-time senior music critic for The New York Times. Patrons at the Vienna premiere in April 1805 must have had “an experience…that was an electrifying, frightening encounter with revolution, with a force sufficient to blast doors and windows out of the room,” wrote critic Michael Steinberg in his book The Symphony.

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Barber’s first orchestral work, his “School” thesis

Samuel Barber

Join the Evanston Symphony Orchestra for a performance of the Overture to The School for Scandal by the twentieth century American composer Samuel Barber. Barber wrote his Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5, as a young student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He would travel to Europe in the summers to continue his studies with his Curtis composition teacher, Rosario Scalero. Barber composed Overture to The School for Sandal as his graduation thesis during one of these trips in the summer of 1931.

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