Midcoast Symphony Orchestra continues 25th Anniversary Celebration with all-American program

LEWISTON — The 25th anniversary season of the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra will continue with a January program featuring American composers, including one of the most popular works in the American symphonic genre, Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite. Symphony in E minor, by Amy Beach, the dean of American women composers, and Jubilee, by George Chadwick, are also on the program. Music Director Rohan Smith will conduct both performances, on Saturday and Sunday, Jan. 24 and 25, in Lewiston and Topsham.

Chadwick and Beach were both leading members of the “Boston School,” of composers, all of whom were intensely interested in establishing an authentically American idiom in symphonic works. Chadwick’s Jubilee (written in 1895) is very much part of that movement. In 1908 the theater critic Henry Taylor Parker wrote that “the American quality of the music lies … in the high and volatile spirits of the music, the sheer rough and tumble of it at its fullest moments.”

The absence of women composers in the symphonic tradition is striking: The women who did overcome the odds and become proficient in composition typically wrote small-scale works that could be performed by themselves or by small groups in largely private or semi-private venues. Beach was a Mozart-like prodigy: she could sing 40 tunes accurately and in the right keys at one year old, could improvise harmonizing parts to her mother’s songs at two, and began composing her own piano pieces at four years old.

Beach’s Symphony in E minor is the first symphony ever written by an American woman. It was premiered by the Boston Symphony, and was highly successful and much respected in its own time, partly simply on its merits, but partly because it was so intentionally “American.”

The Grand Canyon Suite by Grofé was written in 1931, and since then has retained a place in the symphonic canon of Americana. Its picturesque style reminds one of film music from the middle of the 20th century, and it will come as no surprise to learn not only that Grofé wrote and arranged for Hollywood, but also that Walt Disney made a film of the Grand Canyon to go with this music.

The movements—Sunrise, The Painted Desert, On the Trail, Sunset, and Cloudburst—follow each other without a break, but the music is so vivid in its use of music-pictorial devices that listeners can follow the plot with no difficulty.

Symphony performances will be held at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 24, at the Franco Center, and at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 25, at the Orion Performing Arts Center in Topsham. Tickets are $20 and available at www.midcoastsymphony.org, also Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, Now You’re Cooking in Bath, or at the concert hall prior to the performance. For additional information, call 207-846-5378. Those 18 and younger will be admitted free.

Season tickets for the remainder of the 2014/2015 25th Anniversary concert season are available for $45, which includes tickets for all three concerts at either venue, plus a companion ticket so that season ticket holder can share their love of music with a friend.