José Luis Gomez, music director of Arizona’s Tucson Symphony Orchestra, will lead a free series of discussion groups at local libraries this fall, related to this season’s 250th-anniversary celebrations of Beethoven’s birth. The orchestra will perform eight Beethoven symphonies during the 2019-20 season. Gomez has suggested that concertgoers read Russell Martin’s 2000 book Beethoven’s Hair, which follows the tale of one lock of hair and its travels from nineteenth-century Vienna to twenty-first-century America. The book traces the lock, including its purchase in 1994 at Sotheby’s by two Beethoven enthusiasts who set in motion a series of forensic tests in the hope of finding the probable causes of the composer’s bad health, deafness, and death. The discussion groups will take place September 7, 8, and 10 at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library in Tucson, Joyner-Green Valley Library, and the Oro Valley Library.
Posted July 26, 2019
