The Score | Ludwig Goes to Florida

The Beethoven 250th-birthday mania continues, this time with a local focus. The Florida Orchestra has invited five Florida-based composers to write fanfares inspired by Beethoven, to be performed throughout the 2019-20 season. The new works were co-commissioned with Florida colleges and universities where several of the composers are faculty members. The first fanfare, Imagined Adventures: AutoBonn by Kevin Wilt, premiered on October 11 at the Straz Center in Tampa on a program with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, led by Music Director Michael Francis. Wilt stated that the musical motives for AutoBonn, which is about the dream of speeding along in a sports car, are taken from the presto movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14. Paul Richards’s Return the Echo (inspired by the last movement of the Ninth Symphony) was performed in December, followed by Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s the impending silence (about Beethoven’s hearing loss) in January. The orchestra will perform Benjamin Whiting’s as-yet unnamed work in March, and Jason Bahr’s The Light Shines in the Darkness (Lux in tenebris lucet) in May.