TULSA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA TO OPEN WITH RAVEL AND TCHAIKOVSKY
James D. Watts Jr.
Tulsa World
The Tulsa Symphony Orchestra will open its 19th annual season on Sept. 14 with a gala concert featuring popular guest conductor David Lockington and award-winning pianist Sean Chen.
Chen won the Crystal Award (the equivalent of third place) in the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2013, the same year he also won the top prize at the American Pianist Awards.
Chen, who currently is the Jack Strandberg/Missouri Endowed Chair Associate Professor of Piano at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory, will be the soloist for the Piano Concerto in G Major by Ravel.
It will be his first performance in Tulsa since he appeared with the Tulsa Symphony in February 2020, where he performed the Grieg Piano Concerto. The Tulsa World’s review of that concert described Chen’s playing as being “expressive without being showy, shaping... phrases with a kind of casual elegance that made them crackle with freshness, building the first movement cadenza into a display of focused energy and pianistic brio, and bringing a contemplative sensitivity to the quietest sections of the concerto’s slow movement, which faded into a whispered silence before the thunderclap start of the rousing finale.”
The concert will also feature “Umoja: Anthem for Unity,” a composition by Valerie Coleman. Coleman originally created the work as a simple song for a women’s choir, building on the meaning of “umoja,” the Swahili word for unity and the first principle of the African Diaspora holiday Kwanzaa.
Coleman later arranged the work to be performed by the wind ensemble the Imani Winds, of which she is a member. Some two decades later, Coleman created the orchestra version of the work, which the Tulsa Symphony will perform at its concert.
Rounding out the program will be the Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, by Tchaikovsky, a work that the composer feared was a failure upon its debut but which has become one of his most popular and most performed symphonies.
The concert begins at 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 14, at the Tulsa PAC, 101 E. Third St. Tickets are $25-$80. 918-584-3645, tulsasymphony.org.