Saturday, March 11, 2023

7:30pm

 

Music Director Roderick MacDonald and the Worcester Symphony Orchestra kick off their season of public concerts at Mechanics Hall with this wide-ranging program featuring music by the traditional "three Bs" of classical music. The program also illustrates the ongoing development of symphonic music down to the present day. Early arrivers will be able to attend a presentation by Maestro MacDonald outlining plans for future orchestra programs and the development of an ongoing local orchestral presence in Worcester.

 

Worcester Symphony Orchestra (formerly New Engand Symphony Orchestra and Thayer Symphony Orchestra) is the continuation of 40-plus years of music making in central Massachusetts. The orchestra is committed to several local performances each year and is engaged in discussions with several local groups about potential collaborative programming. Roderick MacDonald has been the orchestra's music director since 2014. He is the former principal trumpet of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig and a former conducting student of both Kurt Masur and Bernard Haitink. Under his leadership, the orchestra has increased its use of video programming during the COVID pandemic through such initatives as NESO at Home (downloadable videos of small groups of NESO musicians in intimate settings) and the co-production of AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS with VOX New England.

Father Sean Brett Duggan, O.S.B. will be the featured soloist in J.S. Bach's Piano Concerto No. 1. Father Sean attended Loyola University in New Orleans and recieved a Bachelor of Music degree in piano performance and a Master of Fine Arts degree at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He graduated summa cum laude with a Master of Arts degree in Theology from Notre Dame Seminar in New Orleans and was ordained to the priesthood. In September 1983, Father Duggan won first prize in the Johann Sebastian Bach International Competition for pianists in Washington, D.C., which entitled him, among other honors, to give various concerts around the country and a two-month tour of Germany. In the "Bach Year," 1985, he gave complete performances of The Well-Tempered Clavier in New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Birmingham to critical acclaim. In 1991 he participated again in the Bach Competition in Washington, D.C.; this time he was one of three first-place winners. which entitled him to another round of concert engagements and a second tour of Germany.

 

Throughout the year 2000, the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, Father Duggan performed the complete cycle of the composer's keyboard works eight times in a series of fifteen recitials entitled "Bach On the Threshold of Hope."

 

Father Duggan, currently on the piano faculty at the State University of New York at Fredonia, is in the midst of recording the complete (non-organ) keyboard works of Bach for commercial release.

 

See past Worcester Symphony Orchestra performances below: 

Wagner: "Meistersinger" at Mechanics Hall

Haydn: "Trumpet Concerto: Andante" at Mechanics Hall