The Florida Orchestra has commissioned five Florida-based composers to write fanfares inspired by Beethoven, to be performed during the 2019-20 season, marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020. The first fanfare, Imagined Adventures: AutoBonn by Kevin Wilt, premiered on October 11 at the Straz Center in Tampa on a program with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, led by Music Director Michael Francis. Wilt’s piece was inspired by Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4. Paul Richards’s Return the Echo (inspired by the last movement of the Ninth Symphony) will be performed in December, followed by Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s the impending silence (about Beethoven’s hearing loss) in January, an as yet unnamed work by Benjamin Whiting in March, and Jason Bahr’s The Light Shines in the Darkness (Lux in tenebris lucet) in May. The fanfares were co-commissioned by Florida colleges and universities where several of the fanfare composers are faculty members.
Posted October 15, 2019
