Cultural Event Essay - the Ucf Symphony Orchestra

Cultural Event Essay

The UCF Symphony Orchestra held a concert on November 18th, 2006. It

was located at St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Oviedo. The Symphony began at

about seven PM. The orchestra played four pieces and concluded a little before

nine.

I have a personal interest in music, and I had never seen a live orchestra so

I was naturally inclined to look for an event similar to this one. In class I heard

about the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, but when I looked on the internet,

there were no shows that I could attend and the tickets were expensive. The

closest performance was also about a thirty minute dirve. I decided to see what the

UCF orchestra had to offer. I used the search function on the UCF website to find

show times. I was glad to see that there were several concerts that very week, they

were close in distance, and they were free of charge.

The musical piece that I found most interesting, although certainly not

most listenable, was the second piece, Violin Concerto No. 1 by Karol

Szymanowski. The conductor, Laszlo Mariosi, seemed to have a particular interest

in this piece as well, as he spent about nine or ten minutes introducing it. It

apparently had what is called an "Impressionistic" style to it. The piece began

softly with some strange-sounding, tonally ambiguous melodies centered around

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the violin. The lead violin part of this entire piece was absolutely incredible. Not

only was the fingering very fast and demanding but the combinations of notes

seemed to be without any simple patterns to follow or memorize. Ayako

Yonetani, an internationally known violinist, came to play this part. As the song

progressed, the strings and wind intruments would lace around the melodies of the

violin, building up to a series of crescendos. Several times a crescendo would

build up to a point of high tension, as if on a dominant chord or a series of leading

tones, and then purposely rob the listener of the satisfaction of release from that

tension. Several times during this peace my hears were begging to hear a "root

note", but were instead abused in many different directions as the piece continued.

Towards the middle of the piece, the progressions seemed to be more diatonic. As

the piece progressed, there seemed to be slightly more patterns in the music that

the ear could follow and a more easy flow of tension and release. It is possible

however, that my ear was simply getting use to the exotic melodies employed by

this piece and this created the illusion of more diatonic-sounding progressions.

Percussion played a very large part in this piece especially towards the end. The

tympani player would use successive rolls to create an intense sound going along

with the melody. There was a violin solo near the end of the piece, which I can

only describe as absolutely rediculous. The solo was full of more tonally

ambiguous lines at blazing speeds that shot from low tones to high tones. The

piece continues with more measures of the orchestra lacing around the violin's

melodies. It employed some drone-tone crescendos followed by a single dissonant

note. The piece concluded in a similar manner, leaving the listener with a feeling

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of "...?".

I