The Kishwaukee Symphony Orchestra begins its 46th concert season on Saturday, October 15, 2022, with “The Price is Right: Celebrating Life of Florence Price,” led by Linc Smelser, KSO music director and conductor. The concert will be held at 7:30 pm, in the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall in the Music Building of Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. The concert will feature works by Black composers Florence Price and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Those attending the concert are invited to join Smelser for a free pre-concert talk to learn more about the composers and themes presented in their music, at 6:30 pm in a room near the Concert Hall.
This concert is supported in part by Ann and James Tucker.
On the evening’s program:
- Symphony No. 3 in C Minor and Piano Concerto in One Movement, by Florence Price, Sung Hoon Mo, piano soloist
- Ballade in A Minor, Op. 33, by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Pianist Sung Hoon Mo maintains an active solo and collaborative career, and his playing has been praised as “deeply expressive with a tinge of tragic.”
His chamber music concerts have taken him to Hanover and Munich and surrounding cities in Germany, as well as cities in Canada and South America. He has performed in such venues as the Chicago Philharmonic Chamber Music Series, Chicago Symphony Chamber Music Series, and the Pilgrim Chamber Players. Mo has been a guest performer at DePaul University, University of Chicago, and University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee Peck School of Music. He has given solo and chamber performances at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and his performances have been heard on WQXR in New York City.
He studied at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, the Jacob School of Music at Indiana University, and the Eastman School of Music. His teachers and coaches include James Tocco, Ellen Mack, Leon Fleisher, Robert McDonald and Paul Schenly.
Mo is currently on the faculty of the Music Institute of Chicago and is also a Guest Lecturer at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music.
About the composers
Price was the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major symphony orchestra. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Symphony No. 1 by a then little-known composer.
Her work faded into obscurity after her death in 1953. Much of it was thought to be lost, until a cache of music was found in her former summer house in Chicago in 2009.
Coleridge-Taylor, a composer who influenced Price, was an English composer, conductor and political activist who fought against racial prejudice with his incredible compositions.
Born in Holborn, a district in central London, in 1875 to an English mother and a father originally from Sierra Leone, he liked to be identified as Anglo-African – and was later referred to by white New York musicians as “Black Mahler,” owing to his musical success.
Tickets
Tickets are sold online anytime and in the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall lobby starting 30 minutes prior to the concert. All seats are general admission (no reserved seating); it is recommended to arrive early. Individual ticket prices are $18 for adults, $15 for seniors 62 and older, and $7 for students and children.
Visit kishorchestra.org/ticket-info for information about season ticket subscription packages.
WNIU/WNIJ is the radio station sponsor for the KSO, featuring KSO concerts broadcast on select Monday nights on WNIU’s Encore program.
To learn more about the KSO and to see its full concert schedule, visit kishorchestra.org. Follow the orchestra on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Changes in programs, dates, times and locations of concerts will be posted on the KSO website and social media.
Original source can be found here.
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