Celebrating Candler Schaffer’s 15th season

sponsored by Lunn’s Colonial Funeral Home

Celebrations * Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

Spiral * Sir Paul McCartney

Radiant Voices * Frank Ticheli

Violoncello Concerto in B minor, Op.4 * Dvorak

Julie Albers ~ Cellist, Guest Artist

Candler Schaffer and the Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra celebrate a fresh, new season with jubilant, upbeat selections from Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Sir Paul McCartney and Frank Ticheli.  Celebrations lives up to its title, energetically passing light and lively themes around the orchestra like a child’s game of Hot Potato.  Less rollicking yet no less joyous, Spiral celebrates an orchestral soundscape with new age style, impressionistic and sweet, that Sgt. Pepper eagerly would have taught the band to play.  Ticheli, meanwhile, searched the urban landscape of Los Angeles’ 1992 riots “to compose a dramatic fantasy, powerful in expression, bright and optimistic in nature—a sounding of Radiant Voices amid the turmoil.”  Guest artist Julie Albers joins the WFSO for a concluding celebration of the cello with Antonin Dvorak’s Cello Concerto No. 2 in B minor.  Dvorak’s friend and mentor Johannes Brahms praised this concerto, “Why on earth didn’t I know that one could write a cello concerto like this?  If I had only known, I would have written one long ago!”