Symphony, Shakespearean festival to collaborate for concerts
Narrators from the Utah Shakespeare Festival will join the Utah Symphony and guest conductor Nicholas McGegan on a magical journey through Mendelssohn's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
They will present this collaborative work on Friday, Feb. 25 and Saturday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. in Abravanel Hall. Narrators include Utah Shakespeare Festival founder Fred Adams, the festival's new artistic directors Brian Vaughn and David Ivers, and Kymberly Mellen, a regular festival performer and theater professor at Brigham Young University. The orchestra will also be joined by Utah Opera "Ensemble" Resident Artists Angela Theis and Kate Tombaugh, as well as the women of the Utah Symphony Chorus.
In addition to "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the program will include Haydn's "Symphony No. 59 in A Major" and Handel's "Music for the Royal Fireworks," all of which were initially intended to serve as background music for various subjects and later became more frequently performed as stand-alone works.
McGegan and Utah Symphony Vice President of Artistic Planning Toby Tolokan will present a free pre-concert lecture each night, 45 minutes prior to the start of the performance in the First Tier Room of Abravanel Hall.
Nicholas McGegan is loved by audiences and orchestras for performances that match authority with enthusiasm, scholarship with joy, and curatorial responsibility with evangelical exuberance. The London Independent calls him "one of the finest baroque conductors of his generation," and The New Yorker lauds him as "an expert in 18th-century style." Through 25 years as its music director, McGegan has established the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra as the leading period performance band in America, and at the forefront of the "historical" movement worldwide thanks to appearances at Carnegie Hall, the London Proms and the International Handel Festival, Göttingen where he has been artistic director since 1991.
Fred C. Adams founded the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 1961 with his late wife Barbara Gaddie Adams. Under Adams's guidance, the Festival has grown from a budget of $1,000 and 3,276 paid admissions in 1962 to the upcoming 50th Anniversary Celebration in 2011 with an anticipated attendance of more than 130,000 and an annual budget of $6.5 million. The Festival is considered one of the most prestigious theatres in the United States, as evidenced by the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, which the Festival received in June of 2000. During the past decade, he has focused his energies on the completion of the new $32.7 million Shakespeare Theatre.
Tickets for the evening's performances can be purchased by visiting www.usuo.org.
