Essay About Musical Piece And Second Piece

Ucf Symphony Orchestra 2006
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Cultural Event Essay
The UCF Symphony Orchestra held a concert on November 18th, 2006. It
was located at St. Lukes Lutheran Church in Oviedo. The Symphony began at
about seven PM. The orchestra played four pieces and concluded a little before
nine.
I have a personal interest in music, and I had never seen a live orchestra so
I was naturally inclined to look for an event similar to this one. In class I heard
about the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, but when I looked on the internet,
there were no shows that I could attend and the tickets were expensive. The
closest performance was also about a thirty minute dirve. I decided to see what the
UCF orchestra had to offer. I used the search function on the UCF website to find
show times. I was glad to see that there were several concerts that very week, they
were close in distance, and they were free of charge.
The musical piece that I found most interesting, although certainly not
most listenable, was the second piece, Violin Concerto No. 1 by Karol
Szymanowski. The conductor, Laszlo Mariosi, seemed to have a particular interest
in this piece as well, as he spent about nine or ten minutes introducing it. It
apparently had what is called an “Impressionistic” style to it. The piece began
softly with some strange-sounding, tonally ambiguous melodies centered around
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the violin. The lead violin part of this entire piece was absolutely incredible. Not
only was the fingering very fast and demanding but the combinations of notes
seemed to be without any simple patterns to follow or memorize. Ayako
Yonetani, an internationally known violinist, came to play this part. As the song
progressed, the strings and wind intruments would lace around the melodies of the
violin, building up to a series of crescendos. Several times a crescendo would
build up to a point of high tension, as if on a dominant chord or a series of leading
tones, and then purposely rob the listener of the satisfaction of release from that
tension. Several times during this peace my hears were begging to hear a “root
note”, but were instead abused in many different directions as the piece continued.
Towards the middle of the piece, the progressions seemed to be more diatonic. As
the piece progressed, there seemed to be slightly more patterns in the music that
the ear could follow and a more easy flow of tension and release. It is possible
however, that my ear was simply getting use to the exotic melodies employed by
this piece and this created the illusion of more diatonic-sounding progressions.
Percussion played a very large part in this piece especially towards the end. The
tympani player would use successive rolls to create an intense sound going along
with the melody. There was a violin solo near the end of the piece, which I can
only describe as absolutely rediculous. The solo was full of more tonally
ambiguous lines at blazing speeds that shot from low tones to high tones. The
piece continues with more measures of the orchestra lacing around the violins
melodies. It employed some drone-tone crescendos followed by a single dissonant
note. The piece concluded in a similar manner, leaving the listener with a feeling
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of “?”.
I also enjoyed the last piece, Concerto No. 1 in E minor by Frederick
Chopin. This was a piece that was centered around the piano. This piece had a
very demanding piano soloist part which was played by Laurent Boukobza, who is
a piano proffessor at the University of Central Florida. In contrast the second
piece,