Enhance your concert experience with a sneak preview — Composers come alive and their passions take center stage when ESO Maestro Lawrence Eckerling takes you on an insider’s tour of the history and highlights behind the music.
Friday, October 16 at 1:30 pm,
Merion’s Crystal Ballroom at
529 Davis St, Evanston.
FREE and open to the public.
Please RSVP to 847-570-7815.
Light refreshments will be served and casual tours of apartments will be available after the program.
Give the gift of music by ordering directly from our website and purchasing a custom gift certificate in any denomination of your choice! Certificates may be redeemed for single ticket or season subscriptions for any of our concerts.
You will receive an electronic gift certificate or we can mail the certificate to you or directly to the recipient.
How lucky can one orchestra be?! Maya Anjali Buchanan, the soloist for our May 14, 2023, concert, was so well received by our audience that she’s coming back to open our 2024-2025 season on November 3 with the Korngold Violin Concerto. Here’s an update of our last interview:
Jessie Montgomery, composer, violinist, and educator, was born December 8, 1981, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to artistic parents. Her mother, award-winning playwright Robbie McCauley, wrote traditional and experimental plays addressing race throughout the 1970s and into the 2010s before her death in 2021. Her father, Edward Montgomery, ran a studio for myriad artistic styles and practiced with her every day.
Czech composer Antonin Dvořák was born in 1841 in Nelahozeves (near Prague) in the Austrian Empire. The oldest of 14 children, Antonin’s upbringing in Nelahozeves nurtured his strong Bohemian heritage, which so strongly influenced his music. Dvořák took organ, piano, and violin lessons and at the young age of 14, composed the Forget-Me-Not Polka in C in 1855.
The first saxophone was invented around 1840 in Brussels by Adolphe Sax, whose family was a maker of woodwind instruments. The metal-bodied, single-reed instrument was developed through the rest of the 19th century, primarily in French-speaking regions. Music with sax began to emerge in the 19th century and was used strikingly in important orchestral works in the early 20th. Earlier this season, you’ve heard saxophones at Pick-Staiger in both Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances and Gershwin’s An American in Paris.
