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Daniel Oh, winner of The Richard Giangiulio Irving Youth Concerto Competition 2008, will play George Frederick Handel's Concerto in b minor. The Irving High School violist was accepted into this year's TMEA All-State Orchestra, after four years of being selected for All-Region and All-City Orchestras and three years of membership in the Lone Star Youth Orchestra. For two consecutive years, he has earned First Division ratings at UIL Solo and Ensemble Contest. He is a member of his church orchestra and plays electric guitar for the New Song United Praise Team. Nicole Brown was his 6th grade orchestra teacher, when he began playing the viola. Daniel has also studied with Dean Raskin, Tara Truex, and Barbara Allen. He is grateful for his family and all of their support through the years.
 

 

Notes

Academic Festival Overture, op. 73
Johannes Brahms (b Hamburg, 1833; d Vienna, 1897)

When in 1879, the University of Breslau invited Johannes Brahms to receive an honorary doctoral degree, Brahms composed Academic Festival Overture in acknowledgement of the occasion. Brahms described the overture as "a jolly potpourri of student songs a la Suppé."

Academic Festival overture is in sonata form and features four college songs. The first was a long-banned revolutionary tune: Wir hatten gebauet ein stattiches Haus (We have built a stately house). Two contrasting tunes are later heard: the patriotic Der Landesvater (The Land Father) and a freshman hazing song, Was Kommt dort von der Höhe (What comes from afar). Brahms rounds out the overture with Gaudeamus Igitur (Therefore let us rejoice).

When Academic Festival Overture was presented to the university on January 4, 1881, it was greeted with some shock and scandal because of the raucous themes and ironic pathos.

After the success of his Second Symphony, Sibelius wrote incidental music for the play Kuolema (Death) written by his brother-in-law, Arvid Järnefelt. A most haunting movement from this music was the Valse Triste which was published separately in 1904. Next to Finlandia, this is Sibelius’s most popular work.

Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito was written in Prague for the occasion of the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia in September of 1791, and coincides with the writing of The Magic Flute and the Requiem. This opera is a rare example written in Mozart’s later years of the opera seria style and is based on a libretto by Pietro Metastasio originally written a half century earlier. The story is based on the life of Roman Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, and was elaborated by Metastasio from some brief hints in the Lives of the Caesars by the Roman writer Suetonius.

In 1850 Robert Schumann was appointed Conductor and Director of the Allgemeiner Musikverien in Düsseldorf. His Symphony No. 3, inspired by the great cathedral of Cologne, was completed in December of that year. News of the elevation of the Archbishop of Cologne to Cardinal inspired an additional movement preceding the finale of the Symphony No. 3 with the subtitle, "in the character of a procession of a solemn ceremony."