Fittingly, the Indiana Wind Symphony’s upcoming concert is called “Winter Festival: All That Sparkles.” The recent winter storm was a factor in adjusting the music lineup.
IWS Music Director Charles Conrad said two rehearsals were canceled because of potential COVID-19 exposure, and then another was canceled because of the Feb. 2 winter storm. So Conrad took out a few pieces and turned it into a concert without an intermission.
Principal flutist Carl Butler will be the featured soloist when the concert is presented at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 20 at the Palladium at the Center for the Performing Arts.
Butler will play a piece called “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saens. It will be the second piece performed.
“It’s a piece played by both violinist or flutist,” Conrad said. “It works equally well in both versions.”
The concert will open with “Fanfare for Freedom” by Harry Bulow, a music professor at Purdue University.
The piece IWS took the concert title from is “Sparkle” by Shafer Mahoney.
“It features piano, flutes and clarinets on a really wonderful sparkling melody,” Conrad said.
The next piece is Norman Dello Joio’s ‘Caccia.” Dello Joio died in 2008.
“Dello Joio wrote for all kinds of ensembles, orchestras, choirs and concert bands,” Conrad said. “He also wrote some music for films.”
The piece that follows is George Rosenkrans’ “The Illuminator.”
“He is a composer who never achieved much fame even though he wrote a lot of music, and a lot of it is quite good,” Conrad said. “He was kind of a hermit who lived in central Pennsylvania. He published a lot of his pieces, but a lot were stored in a trunk in his house. Some of them were published after his death in the 1950s.”
The concert concludes with “Bookmarks from Japan: Symphony No. 4” by Julie Giroux.
“She has a lot of history in Hollywood,” Conrad said. “She studied with John Williams and Bill Conti and a couple of other well-known Hollywood composers. She specializes in writing wonderful work for concert bands. In this piece, there are six movements, and each one is inspired by a Japanese print she saw on a series of bookmarks from the mid-19th century.
“It will have some of the traditional Japanese musical textures people will expect, including lots of drums.”
For more, visit indianawindsymphony.org.
