This Saturday and Sunday, Guest Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya and the Elgin Symphony Orchestra take to the Hemmens stage again alongside Flautist Brandon Patrick George with Jacques Ibert’s intricate Flute Concerto.
Yankovskaya is a fiercely committed advocate for Slavic masterpieces, operatic rarities, and contemporary works on the leading edge of classical music. She has conducted more than 40 world premieres, including 17 operas, and her strength as a visionary collaborator has guided new perspectives on staged and symphonic repertoire from Carmen and Queen of Spades to Price and Prokofiev. As Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater, her daring performances before and amid the pandemic earned recognition from the Chicago Tribune, which praised her as “the very model of how to survive adversity, and also how to thrive in it,” while naming her Chicagoan of the Year.
Brandon Patrick George is a leading flute soloist and GRAMMY-nominated chamber musician whose repertoire extends from the Baroque era to today. He is the flutist of Imani Winds and has appeared as a soloist with the Atlanta, Baltimore, and Albany symphonies, American Composers Orchestra, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, among others. He has been praised as “elegant” by The New York Times, as a “virtuoso” by The Washington Post, and as a “knockout musician with a gorgeous sound” by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The evening will also include the performance of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, also known as The Unfinished Symphony because the genius composer wrote only the first two movements, although he lived for 6 more years. This will be followed by Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber.
Performances will be Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2:30 at The Hemmens in Elgin. Tickets are available here.
