Tri-County Symphonic Band

As a musical equivalent of sending cards, flowers, chocolates and other gifts on Valentine’s Day, the Tri-County Symphonic Band, under the direction of Philip Sanborn, invites everyone to enjoy a concert of music called “Love is in the Winds.” The concert is at 3:00 pm on Sunday, February 14 (Valentine’s Day), at Dartmouth High School, 555 Bakerville Road, South Dartmouth.

The program begins with Serge Prokofiev’s March from “The Love for Three Oranges.” The satirical opera “Love for Three Oranges” is based on a witch’s curse that compels the Prince to be obsessed with love for three oranges. The opera is infrequently performed, but the march is one of Prokofiev’s more popular works.

No truer love can be found than that of Lohengrin and Elsa from Richard Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” The band will play a wonderful transcription of Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral. This is the music that precedes the well-known bridal chorus and represents the joy as well as the uncertainty Elsa has as she is about to wed a man whose true identity is unknown to her.

With love, families come together. In the case of the Montagues and the Capulets, the families could not be more polarized. Prokofiev’s musical depiction of these battling families from his ballet “Romeo and Juliet” is raucous and then sweet and then raucous again. Prokofiev uses broad strokes with the brass and offsets the brutality with expressive woodwind passages.

The twisted love triangle that was revealed in the novel “The Phantom of the Opera” was vaulted into popularity with the 1986 West End musical production with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Tri-County Symphonic Band will do a medley of selections from the musical including “Think of Me,” “Angel of Music,” “All I Ask of You,” “The Point of No Return,” and “The Music of the Night.”

The concert will conclude with the Violin Concerto in D Major by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with Jesse Holstein, violin. The piece was written in Clarens, a Swiss resort on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Tchaikovsky had gone to recover from the depression brought on by his disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova. He was joined there by his composition pupil, the violinist Iosif Kotek. The two played works for violin and piano together. Since Tchaikovsky was not a violinist, he sought the advice of Kotek on the completion of the solo part. “How lovingly he’s busying himself with my concerto!” Tchaikovsky wrote. “It goes without saying that I would have been able to do nothing without him. He plays it marvelously.” The first performance of the concerto was eventually given by Adolph Brodsky on December 4, 1881 in Vienna. The work is regarded as one of the most beautiful and, at the same time, one of the most incredibly difficult violin concertos ever written.

Tickets for the concert are $15 for adults and $5 for students. Children 12 and under are admitted free. Tickets can be purchased at the Symphony Music Shop in Dartmouth and The Bookstall in Marion. Any remaining tickets will be sold at the door. Please visit http://tricountysymphonicband.org/ for more information.

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