7:30PM, Friday, December 17, 2010 at
First United Methodist Church, Boulder
As the Boulder Symphony continues to journey to the farthest reaches of creation, we are collecting precious gems of classical music that are based in folk elements. Both Mozart and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov traveled extensively, and absorbed musical elements of all their journeys. The Turkish Violin concerto will be performed by Gregory Walker, who will explore all the possibilities of creation, as Mozart would have done through improvised cadenzas. Rimsky-Korsakov, when he wrote Capriccio Espagnol, which will feature the exceptional solo talents of members of the Boulder Symphony, summed up Spanish life almost as well as Emmanuel Chabrier. For Finlandia Jean Sibelius took a simple folk song of his native land, and by rallying the independence movement against Russia, composed the unofficial national anthem of Finland.
Since a marathon performance of Bruch’s Kol Nidre, an original arrangement of Ora No Omboko, and his own Bad Rap for Violin and Chamber Orchestra with the Colorado Symphony in 1996, Gregory Walker has charted his own creative course while developing unique collaborations with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Breckenridge Festival Orchestra, the Ft. Collins Symphony, the Yaquina Chamber Orchestra, and the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, as well as Poland’s Filharmonia Sudecka and the Encuentro Musical de los Americas in Havana, Cuba. A professor at the University of Colorado Denver and concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, his CRI, Orion, Leonarda, and Albany discography showcases the “precision and rapturous immediacy” described by the American Record Guide. An official NS Design electric violin artist, he has also appeared with pop star Lyle Lovett. His Electric Vivaldi Newport Classic enhanced compact disc, an interpretation/remix of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the Boulder Philharmonic, was released in 2006. Walker appears on the cover of the April 2007 International Musician magazine. In 2009, he made his debut with the Philadelphia orchestra performing on the 1718 “ex- Székely” Stradivarius, and in 2010 his recording of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer George Walker’s Violin Concerto with the Sinfonia Varsovia in Warsaw, Poland was released by Albany Records. He is currently working with filmmaker Charles Fryberger on Song of the Untouchable, a documentary film project that will take him to Kerala, India, to perform with Dalit caste musicians: http://songoftheuntouchable.blogspot.com/
Emmanuel
