World premiere anchors program

By Peter Alexander Oct. 4 at 9:45 p.m.

The Longmont Symphony will open its 2022–23 season at with a concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday (Oct. 8) in the Vance Brand Civic Auditorium in Longmont.

Music director Elliot Moore will conduct the concert, which features a world premiere and guest artist Clancy Newman, cello. The world premiere, written specifically for the time after the COVID pandemic, will be Symphony for the Great Return by John Hennecken. Newman will play Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, the most popular cello concerto. Other works on the program will be Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and George Walker’s Lyric for Strings.

Hennecken’s Symphony is in three movements. The first, “Dark Spring Horizon,” represents the feeling in early 2020, when there was a sense of foreboding but the pandemic had not yet broken out widely. The second, “Windows,” uses the disparate sounds of solo violin and timpani to represent social distancing and sense of isolation during the pandemic. And the finale, “The Great Return,” was written during the upheaval following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and uses a variation on African-American composer George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, also heard on the program.

Longmont Symphony, Elliot Moore, conductor
With Clancy Newman, cello

• Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man
• George Walker: Lyric For Strings
• John Hennecken: Symphony for the Great Return (world premiere)
• Dvořák: Cello Concerto

7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 8
Vance Brand Civic Auditorium, Longmont
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