Omaha Symphony Music Director Thomas Wilkins
KVNO News
Unfinished Business for the Omaha Symphony
By Bill Grennan, KVNO NewsMarch 17th, 2016
Omaha, NE — Never finished, always wonderful.
Two of the Romantic era’s most beloved composers’ unfinished final works will take center stage in the Omaha Symphony’s Schubert and Bruckner Unfinished Symphonies. The performances will be Friday, March 18th and Saturday, March 19th at 7:30 p.m. inside the Holland Performing Arts Center.
The show’s conductor, Omaha Symphony Music Director Thomas Wilkins, thinks the two pieces will be a treat for Omaha audiences.
“This a sublime program,” he said.
“There’s loud music on it for sure. There’s fast, energetic music in
spots but it’s a very contemplative program. It’s the kind of thing that
just allows to sit in the back of your seat and reflect. Indeed, there
are moments in the Bruckner where that reflection is high drama but
often it’s very philosophical and personal. It’s a very different kind
of program than we’ve done. We’ve done these kind of pieces before but
never on the same program. To do the Schubert ‘Unfinished’ and then the
Bruckner No. 9 Unfinished is a wonderful poetic combination.”
Both symphonies are unfinished
because their respective composer died before completion and, therefore,
represent the last testaments and final thoughts of two great musical
thinkers. Wilkins discussed how a symphony like Schubert contrasted from
the composer’s earlier works.
“My favorite Schubert symphony is
five,” he said. “Five is fresh and innocent, like sorbet almost. But his
either symphony is grown up. For me, that’s the major difference
between one period and the other. He was always a great thinker and he
knew how to be serious when he was younger, but for me to contrast these
two symphonies for Schubert, they’re really night and day.”
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony presented a
different kind of challenge for Wilkins. He’s never conducted that
particular symphony before for a reason some listeners might not expect.
“I’ve come to this conclusion just
this week, as a matter of fact. I was too young,” he said. “There are
plenty of young conductors that conduct Bruckner, but I wasn’t going to
be one of those guys because I just didn’t get it. Now, I look at this
music, I look at the gestures of this music, I look at the pacing of
this music, and I realize that now I get it. I have a better
understanding of what ‘slow’ is. For me, the challenge was to able to
live with it; to be will to go ‘Okay, here’s the exciting thing about
being an artist.’ It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been doing
something, there’s always something new that can be in front of you. If
you embrace that new thing in front of you, you’ll continue to grow. Who
among us doesn’t want to grow in any endeavor?”
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