Your MSO's Most Joyous Concert of the Season

The year is drawing to an end – but the most joyous time of year is just beginning.  And it will be especially jolly for you, our audience members of the Mariposa Symphony Orchestra.

All throughout our first decade of December Holiday Concerts of your MSO, I’ve aimed to program a seasonally happy, festive, old-fashioned, warm and yes, jolly get-together for friends and families who love music.   Live, symphonic music.   As we celebrate during our 10th Anniversary Season, the tradition that began with our very first concert continues this December 17th.  

Our MSO 10th Season Festive Holiday Concert will open with the most ebulliently brash and joyous symphony of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: his Second, subtitled the “Little Russian” symphony.  Though that descriptor might cause you to imagine a musical work about short-statured Cossacks, “Little Russia” was the pre-20th century name for the region (now-country) we know today as Ukraine.  And the symphony earned that subtitle (not Tchaikovsky’s own) due to the composer’s brilliant use in this symphony and musical peroration of three Ukrainian folksongs to an enormously imaginative degree.  What he does with those tunes is almost like a genius feline playing (seemingly with little design) with a skein of simple yarn but ending up with a remarkably colorful and intricately-patterned Afghan bursting with life.  One wonders how it was possible to do so much with such simple, but memorable material.  And this symphony is nothing short of great fun – with a tremendous finale that simply bellows festive joy. 

The concert’s second half will open with the Third Orchestral Suite in D Major of Johann Sebastian Bach – there’s an associative sound of Baroque music with Christmastime and so I’ve programmed this wonderful piece for December 17.  We’re not exactly sure just when the four orchestral suites were composed; most scholars believe they were written after the mid-1720’s but before 1740.  Precisely when is irrelevant; besides the mere overt joyousness of the entire Third Suite, the second movement is also one of the most recognized pieces of music in the world: the Air (usually referenced as “Air on the G String”) – one of Bach’s most transcendently beautiful inspirations.

Following the Bach will be a piece from the 20th Century built upon a centuries-old tune which was also utilized in 1865 as the Christmas tune we know as “What Child Is This”!   The tune “Greensleeves” was long erroneously credited as having been composed by none other than Henry the 8th of England.  But it’s not at all likely that he wrote it. The first truly legitimate reference to the tune recorded as "A New Northern Dittye of the Lady Greene Sleeves" we have comes from 1580 – a few decades after the death of Henry.  And that original song’s Italianate style of composition (in a rolling 6/8-time) was not known in Britain in Henry’s time.  Whatever its true origins, the hands-down most gloriously beautiful rendering of that tune is British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasy on Greensleeves” which he composed for his 1924-29 opera “Sir John In Love” based upon Shakespeare’s comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”    Simple, absolutely beautiful – and a wonderfully apt piece for our Holiday Concert.

Which then brings us to that final piece – the one which has closed every single MSO December concert since our premiere: a certain “Sierra Christmas Party” which was quickly (some might say “recklessly”) composed by a certain conductor/composer at the instigation of Miriam Costello for our very first MSO concert.

In the last decade that piece has had additions from time to time and our 10th Anniversary Season seemed to demand a new version.  And so, December 17th Festive Holiday Concert will witness the premiere of the brand-new “Sierra Christmas Party 2011!” with the addition of two new classic Christmas-season tunes, symphonically treated on a grand scale.  Don’t worry – the original parts of the piece are all still there, but now there’s a little more: those two tunes are – well, if I tell you in advance, it wouldn’t be quite as much fun as guessing for you, would it?   So – please come to our MSO Festive Holiday Concert at 7:00 on December 17th to find out in person – and also, to have a well-deserved evening of musical joy for yourself and your loved ones.   An affordable evening – as I’ve hoped it would be from our very first: of respite from the hectic activities of the season, from gift-wrapping, from Christmas-card addressing, from baking – an evening dedicated to the joy of music, to the goodwill of the season, to the company of friends and neighbors, of family too – many of who will be on that stage as gifted musicians of the MSO.  An evening during which we may all come together under the finest of circumstances and have a little good old-fashioned musical Holiday joy.
  
And don’t forget to bring a friend – or better yet, to introduce someone to the MSO who’s never been to one of our concerts. After all, happiness is always a little better when it’s shared!

The Mariposa County Arts Council, Inc. is grateful for support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.

Music is not merely sound.
It's something more. It CONNECTS us. It becomes us.

Music makes us laugh, cry and dance. It reminds us of wonderful yesterdays, and gives us hope for better tomorrows.

We fall in love, and CONQUER milestones, all with music.

Music DEFINES generations and gives meaning to a moment.
And when it's great, it deserves to be heard LIVE!

The Mariposa Symphony Orchestra performs in the Mariposa County High School Feister Auditorium. On occasion, the dates selected for a performance must be changed to insure that Mariposa High School students are served as our community's first priority. You are encouraged to send an e-mail to mso@sti.net in order to receive automatically confirmed concert information as soon as it's available, contact the Arts Council office at (209) 966-3155 or info@arts-mariposa.org.