Stars of the Future

Featuring the Grand Prize Winners of the Vernell Gregg Young Artists' Competition

Friday, February 20, 2009

 at 7:30 p.m.

At Lakeland Baptist Church, Lewisville  (Directions)

Adults $25, Seniors (60+) $20, Students $10

Families $60 no matter how large the family.

Special UNT student and faculty rate: $5

Details of the Gregg Competition

The City of Lewisville,

Season Sponsor

plus music chosen by the winners

The 'Beautiful Melusine' Overture

Felix Mendelssohn

The distinguished Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer and composer Conradin Kreutzer collaborated in writing the opera, The Beautiful Melusine.  Mendelssohn heard a performance of Kreutzer’s rather dull opera in the fall of 1833.  He was so annoyed by the overture that he decided to write his own, which he did on November 14.  He always considered the result to be among his best works.

The overture is cast in a sonata form with themes clearly inspired by the libretto; no doubt they would have been the principal themes of the unwritten opera.  Despite some obvious thematic references to characters in the opera, the piece is really abstract music, like Mendelssohn’s more familiar Hebrides Overture.  Here, too, Mendelssohn elegantly shapes his evocative musical gestures for purely musical ends.

Felix Mendelssohn

 Born on February 3, 1809 in Hamburg, Germany

Died on November 4, 1847 in Leipzig, Germany

Felix Mendelssohn, a romantic whose music was rooted in classicism, was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a wealthy and distinguished family.  By the age of nine, he was a brilliant pianist; by thirteen, he had written symphonies, concertos, sonatas, and vocal works of astounding quality.  As a teenager, he performed his compositions at home with a private orchestra for the intellectual and artistic elite of Berlin, where his family had settled.

In 1829, at age twenty, he conducted Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in its first performance since the composer’s death.  This historic concert rekindled interest in Bach and earned Mendelssohn an international reputation.  He performed as pianist, organist, and conductor in Germany and in England, where his music was especially popular. 

He often visited and played for Queen Victoria, and the high point of his career was the triumphant premiere of his oratorio Elijah in Birmingham in 1846.  When only twenty-six, he became conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. 

His personal life was more conventional than that of many romantics; he was happily married and had five children.  But constant travel and work sapped his strength, and he died, after a stroke, at the age of thirty-eight.