June 2025 concert videos
Please enjoy these wonderful videos from our June concert.
Ko-Eun Yi playing Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major.
William Grant Still: Mother and Child.
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Please enjoy these wonderful videos from our June concert.
Ko-Eun Yi playing Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major.
William Grant Still: Mother and Child.
Ko-Eun Yi was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. While no one in her family is a musician — her father is a consultant for start-up businesses and her mother spends significant time as a volunteer — her parents love music and there was always a lot of it in their home. When Ko-Eun’s brother, who is four years older, began piano lessons, three-year-old Ko-Eun was drawn to the piano, very curious about the “sound box” and amazed by the magic coming out of it. She said that even at that young age she could feel how the sound transformed the atmosphere of the room.
I’ve written about the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony before. It’s one of the masterworks of the classical repertoire, alongside the great symphonies of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Mahler. But it’s also a great deal more. A man’s life depended on this symphony. That man was the composer himself.
American composer William Grant Still (1895-1978) is known as the “Dean of African-American Classical Composers,” having written nearly 200 works including symphonies, ballets, operas, and more. In 1931, his first major orchestral composition, Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American,” was performed by the Rochester Philharmonic conducted by Howard Hanson. Not only was it the first time a complete score by an African American composer was performed by a major orchestra, but it also was one of the most popular symphonies by an American composer at the time.
At first glance, George Gershwin and Maurice Ravel might seem to occupy two very different musical worlds, yet they both shared a passion for jazz.
Aaron Copland, born in Brooklyn on Nov. 14, 1900, was destined to become one of America's most renowned composers. He first learned to play the piano from his older sister; at 16, he studied under the tutelage of Rubin Goldmark in Manhattan, which also allowed his interest in classical music to flourish, attending concerts by the New York Symphony and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Jonathan Bailey Holland, current Dean and Professor of Music at Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music, was raised in Flint, Michigan, by music-loving parents who worked for the Flint schools. Music was always playing in their home, either on the radio or from his father’s extensive record collection of everything from jazz to classical. Jonathan says that all styles excited him from an early age and he responded to “any kind of music that made you move!”