Mercury Orchestra: Stravinsky & Rachmaninoff

The Mercury Orchestra

Celebrates

Stravinsky & Rachmaninoff

In Concert at 

Harvard's historic

Sanders Theatre

 

Program:

 

Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky

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Symphonic Dances, Sergei Rachmaninoff

 

Channing Yu,  Conductor

 

The Mercury Orchestra was selected as the national winner of the 2010 American Prize in Orchestral Performance, community orchestra division, in a competition including orchestras from 26 states and the District of Columbia.

The American Prize is a series of non-profit national competitions designed to recognize and reward the very best in the performing arts in the United States. Founded in 2009, the American Prize rewards the best recorded performances of music by individuals and ensembles in the United States at the professional, community/amateur, college/university, church and school levels.

The 97-member Mercury Orchestra, directed by the young American conductor Channing Yu, brings together some of the most talented amateur musicians in the Cambridge/Boston area to perform some of the most challenging works in the symphonic repertoire.

 

 

 

Inspired by Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, England, Sanders Theatre is famous for its design and its acoustics.  A member of the League of Historic American Theatres, the 1,166 seat theatre offers a unique and intimate 180 degree design which provides unusual proximity to the stage.

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Sanders Theatre was designed to function as a major lecture hall and as the site of college commencements. Although Sanders saw its last commencement exercise in 1922, the theatre continues to play a major role in the academic mission of Harvard College, hosting undergraduate core curriculum courses, the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, and the annual Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony.  Many of the most venerable academic, political and literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth century have taken the podium at Sanders Theatre including

Winston Churchill, 

Theodore Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr.   

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  Sanders is presently home to several undergraduate choir and orchestral groups and also serves as a venue for many professional performance ensembles including Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, Boston Chamber Music Society, Christmas Revels, Masterworks Choral and Boston Baroque.

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So.... now you know.  Music isn't just about 'sounds' but the history, the story and the environment in which those sounds resonate.  

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I had a wonderful time !

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Sanders Theatre is not typically available for viewing by the public except during public performances. Photo credit: Steve Rosenthal, Text credit: www.google.com/search?q=wickedpedia