• Our Next Series Concert
    Hungarian Connection

    Bartok

    Liszt

    Sibelius

    with Gleb Ivanov, piano

     

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    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, Gleb Ivanov, at Musical Insights. He and our Maestro Lawrence Eckerling and David Ellis will explore the March concert program in depth.

North Shore Retirement Hotel
Friday, March 14 at 1:30 pm,
North Shore Retirement Hotel
1611 Chicago Avenue, Evanston.
FREE and open to the public.

Symphony Soundbites

Hungarian Connection

This second concert of the ESO’s 68th season showcases masterpieces by the two greatest Hungarian composers, Ferenc (Franz) Liszt and Béla Bartók, plus the most popular symphony by Finland’s greatest composer, Jean Sibelius. Hungary and Finland share the connection of their languages, which are related to each other and are both completely dissimilar to those of their surrounding countries. Equally important, the music of neither Hungary nor Finland is considered an integral part of the Austro-German “mainstream” taught in most music history classes.

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Behind The Scenes at our March Concert

by Maestro Lawrence Eckerling

As a musician, one of the delights in learning music is hearing and identifying when a composer borrows from another composer or source, or borrows from him or herself. (A specific example is listening to the music of John Williams’ score to Star Wars, where he borrows music or style from ­seemingly every composer that I have ever studied!) We know that Bach borrowed music from himself, as did ­Handel, as did Mozart. The list goes on.

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ESO to Perform Bartók's Folk-inspired Masterpiece

Bela Bartok

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, born in 1881, is regarded as one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology. Bartók met the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály when he was a student at the Royal Academy of Budapest. The two composers traveled the Hungarian countryside to collect folk melodies and ultimately preserved thousands of songs. They transcribed the folk melodies, analyzed them and incorporated elements of the melodies in their own music. Over his lifetime, Bartók collected and arranged folk music from Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria.

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