Photo via Frankly Music
Frank Almond - Frankly Music
Frank Almond, violinist and founder of Frankly Music
The first concert of Frankly Music’s 23rd season is September 28 and features the premier of Victoria Bond’s violin concerto, Soul of a Nation, written for the chamber music series’ founder, Frank Almond. Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring will follow intermission. Together they are a meaningful way to celebrate America’s 250th Anniversary.
Bond earned her doctorate in orchestral conducting from Julliard where she studied under Roger Sessions. In addition, she also served as an assistant to Copland. She’s the conductor, lecturer and artistic director of Cutting Edge Concerts. Besides compositions for small chamber groups and symphonies, she’s composed eight operas and has been the principal guest conductor of Chamber Opera, Chicago since 2008.
The concerto was “inspired by the writings of Thomas Jefferson,” Almond says. “Drawing upon the words and ideas of one of the nation’s most consequential—and complex—founding figures, Bond uses the violin as a distinctive individual voice within a larger musical landscape. The concerto invites us to consider the ideals upon which America was founded, while also confronting the distance that can exist between those ideals and the realities of the nation they helped create.”
Bond was also cognizant that Jefferson “was a fairly good violinist, and obsessed with La Folia, a specific harmonic pattern that’s been around for probably 400 years or so,” Almond continues. “Scored for solo violin, strings and narrator, the piece is centered around variations of the La Folia chord structure.”
Copland composed Appalachian Spring for the Martha Graham Dance Company. It premiered in October 1944, and the orchestral suite was finished in 1945. It’s a delightful composition, a musical portrait of America with “spacious sonorities, folk-inspired simplicity, and unmistakable sense of possibility, evok(ing) an American ideal built upon community, optimism, and renewal,” Almond says.
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In his review of the premier for the New York Times, John Martin wrote, “Aaron Copland has written a score of fresh and singing beauty. It is, on its surface, a piece of early Americana, but in reality, it is a celebration of the human spirit.”
For the Bond concerto, Almond will be the violinist and conductor, joined by musicians of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. For the Copland Suite Ryan Tani will be the conductor and Brian Mani the Narrator.
Ticket information and details of the programs for the remainder of the Frankly Music season can be found on the Frankly Music website: https://franklymusic.org or on their extensive Facebook page.
“Soul of a Nation: An American Portrait” will be performed at 7 p.m., September 28, at St Paul's Episcopal Church, 914 E. Knapp St.
