Hill Auditorium
Chineke! Orchestra
$12-20 student tickets available
Chineke! was founded in 2015 as Europe’s first majority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra. The group’s North American debut offers a selection of thought-provoking works by Black composers from the past century.
A new work by Carlos Simon, a U-M alumnus and Kennedy Center composer-in-residence, opens the concert. Fate Now Conquers was inspired by a journal entry in one of Beethoven’s notebooks and is based on the same harmonic structure as the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
Elena Urioste, who won first place in the Sphinx Competition’s Junior Division in 2002 and repeated the feat in the Senior Division five years later, is the violin soloist for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto, “bring[ing] the work everything it deserves: a rich, glowing tone, rhythmic panache, shedloads of charisma, and a tenderness that cradled the slow movement as if it were the most precious jewel in the world.” (The Arts Desk)
Steeped in American folk music, spirituals, and church hymns, Florence Price’s first symphony reflects her experience as a Black woman raised in the post-Civil War South. The premiere of her symphony in Chicago in 1933 marked the first time a major American orchestra had performed a work written by an African American woman composer.
Program
Carlos Simon Fate Now Conquers
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto in g minor, Op. 20
Florence Price Symphony No. 1 in e minor
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Danse Nègre (encore)
Join host Doyle Armbrust for “The Society for Disobedient Listeners” — a special pre-performance talk, 7 pm in the lower lobby of Hill Auditorium. Armbrust will be joined by LaRob K. Rafael, producer and director of Chicago-based Hearing in Color and host, WFMT.
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With a unique combination of intensity, enthusiasm and technical clarity, American conductor Andrew Grams has steadily built a reputation for his dynamic concerts, ability to connect with audiences, and long-term orchestra building.
The youngest of a large mixed-race family from Severn, Maryland, Andrew began studying the violin when he was eight years old in the public school system. In 1999 he received a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance from The Juilliard School, and in 2003 he received a conducting degree from the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied with Otto-Werner Mueller. He was selected to spend the summer of 2003 studying with David Zinman, Murry Sidlin and Michael Stern at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen and returned to that program again in 2004. Mr. Grams served as Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra from 2004-2007 where he worked under the guidance of Franz Welser-Möst, and has since returned for several engagements.
Elena Urioste is a musician, yogi, writer, and entrepreneur, as well as a lover of nature, food, animals, and connecting with other human beings.
As a violinist, Elena has given acclaimed performances as soloist with major orchestras throughout the United States, including the Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Minnesota Orchestras; the New York, Los Angeles, and Buffalo Philharmonics; the Boston Pops; and the Chicago, Boston, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego, National, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Detroit Symphony Orchestras, among many others. Abroad, Elena has appeared with the London Philharmonic, Hallé, Philharmonia, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestras; the BBC Symphony, Philharmonic, Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and National Orchestra of Wales; the Orchestra of Opera North; as well as the Chineke! Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lille, Edmonton Symphony, Würzburg Philharmonic, and Hungary’s Orchestra Dohnányi Budafok and MAV Orchestras. She has collaborated with celebrated conductors Sir Mark Elder, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Vasily Petrenko, Christoph Eschenbach, Robert Spano, Karina Canellakis, and Gábor Takács-Nagy. She has regularly performed as a featured soloist in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium and has given recitals at the Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Kennedy Center, Konzerthaus Berlin, Sage Gateshead, Bayerischer Rudfunk Munich, and Mondavi Center. Elena is a former BBC New Generation Artist (2012-14) and has been featured on the covers of Strings, Symphony, and BBC Music magazines.
Doyle Armbrust is a Chicago-based violist and co-founder of the three-times Grammy-nominated Spektral Quartet. His writing has infiltrated program books at the Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras as well as publications including Crain’s Chicago Business, Chicago Magazine, Time Out Chicago, and The Chicago Tribune.
In UMS’s 2022/23 season, Doyle hosts “The Society of Disobedient Listeners” — an interactive pre-concert experience reconnecting listeners to the subversive, visceral, and even revolutionary elements of the evening’s program. Conceived as an anti-lecture, “Disobedient Listeners” draws the great music of the past into proximity with the felicities and calamities of modern life.
A Bass-Baritone from the DMV area (Maryland), LaRob K. Rafael has been involved with music since childhood and is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied Vocal Performance. He has since gone on to work with arts organizations including Lyric Opera of Chicago, La Caccina (a professional women’s ensemble), Black Opera Alliance, Black Administrators of Opera, and Sphinx Organization to name a few. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Hearing in Color and combines his experience and research to change the predominantly white, European, male classical canon.
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