The hoe-down from Copland’s Rodeo “ ‘is an eastern Kentucky fiddle tune,’ says Teddy Abrams, conductor of the Louisville Orchestra,” writes Dylon Jones in Thursday’s (4/5) Louisville Magazine (KY). “Concertgoers got a musical version of this history lesson a couple weeks ago during the first show in the third annual Festival of American Music. Just before the orchestra tore through Rodeo, Abrams wheeled an upright piano to the front of the stage and brought out Louisville singer-songwriter Joan Shelley and award-winning bluegrass fiddler Michael Cleveland.… Abrams demonstrated the tunes … with Shelley and Cleveland…. After an orchestral piece by Edgar Meyer, a folk/classical bassist … the orchestra welcomed several performers … onto the stage to play their own songs. [At] the second concert of the festival on Saturday … the most ambitious piece in the concert is probably [Michael] Gordon’s Natural History, a work Abrams premiered with the Britt Festival Orchestra at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon … for orchestra, full chorus, an additional 30-odd brass and percussion players and several members of the Klamath Native American tribes [who] will perform with the orchestra … along with 30 extra brass and percussion players.”
Posted April 6, 2018
