Music Director Travis Jürgens, Music Director, serves as Director of Music Ministry at Saint Ambrose Catholic Parish and as Music Director of the fully professional Perrysburg Symphony Orchestra. He won 2nd Prize and the President of the Jury Award at the 2019 Bucharest Music Institute International Conducting Competition. He has collaborated with esteemed conductors, including Michael Tilson Thomas and Marin Alsop. He has been praised as “a superior conductor” and “well on his way to becoming a major conductor in the world of symphony orchestras” (Opus Colorado).
Antoin Dvořák – American Suite in A Major, OP. 98b
The Suite in A major was written at the beginning of 1894 as a five-movement piano piece which Dvořák arranged for orchestra a year later.
The work is a suite in the broadest sense: a sequence of five movements. The first movement has a festive atmosphere and sets the mood as a prelude to the entire cycle. The “American” tone of the work has already been established by the third bar. The second movement with distinctive use of triplets in both the melodic line and the lower voices, introduces a high degree of mobility. The third movement’s principal theme is reminiscent of a polonaise or “sousedská,” a Czech folk dance. The fourth movement is a typical example of Dvořák’s lyricism – here a kind of dream-like nocturne stemming from a single melodic idea. The piece ends with a memento of the first movement.
George Frederick McKay – Scenes from the Southwest
McKay captures the wide-open spaces of the Southwest, with soaring string lines and brass fanfares. George Frederick McKay was a prolific modern American composer.McKay was born in the small frontier wheat farming town of Harrington, Washington. His family later moved to Spokane, where he attended school up to his college years. He was attracted to the American folk-song, including jazz and blues and Native American themes, and to a great degree, his music contains a poignant evocation of the West Coast American spirit, including glimpses of a populist era of street marches, honky-tonk dance halls and social chaos along with a recognition of the great natural beauty of his home region and its vitality. Many of McKay's symphonic works center on folk themes and include pieces dedicated to Native American music.
Clare Grundman – Second American Folk Rhapsody
With exquisite simplicity, this medley is true to Grundman form with carefully crafted American folk songs in a symphonic setting. Includes Billy Boy, Skip to My Lou, and Shenandoah.
Inspired by quintessential American folk songs, this Rhapsody reflects the historical geographic origins of the people who sang them. "Billy Boy" is a traditional American folk song and nursery rhyme. It is a variant of the traditional English folk song "My Boy Billy". "Skip to my Lou" is a partner stealing dance from the 1840's. A lone man chooses a woman he likes, and her partner becomes the next lone man. "Lou" comes from "Loo", a Scottish word for love. "Shenandoah" originated in the early 1800's among the fur traders of the Northeast and evolved into many versions. Shenandoah was an Oneida Iroquois chief, and the song involves his daughter in a romantic way.
Alan Hovhaness – Symphony No. 2 “Mysterious Mountain”
Since the 1960s, Mysterious Mountain has been Hovhaness's most celebrated and widely performed orchestral work. Symphony No.2's sub-title does not portray any specific mountain, but rather "the whole idea of mountains". In fact, Hovhaness admitted a lack of any real connection between some of his exotic titles and musical content. The symphony's title serves the music well, and commentators have remarked on this work's evocative, even metaphysical qualities. Of the premiere, Houston’s Post reported:
"Hovhaness produces a texture of the utmost beauty, gentleness, distinction and expressive potential. The real mystery of Mysterious Mountain is that it should be so simply, sweetly, innocently lovely in an age that has tried so terribly hard to avoid those impressions in music."
Hubert Roussel, The Houston Post
This music is overtly melodic and colorful. As with Hovhaness, it is something of a melting pot of his musical tools.