<< Home
Beethoven Goes to the Dogs
Beethoven Goes to the Dogs
Maestro Peter Bay leads the final concert of our season in unexpected company: Ludwig van Beethoven’s first symphony shares a stage with a pack of cartoon dogs. Those dogs are Thurber’s Dogs, a suite of short orchestral sketches by Peter Schickele, better known as his satirical alter ego P.D.Q. Bach, after the drawings of James Thurber. Each movement captures a different personality, clumsy or noble or distracted, and each is crafted with charm, precision, and Schickele’s sharp ear for musical character.
Our principal oboist Laura Arganbright is featured in Marie Clémence de Grandval’s Oboe Concerto, a lyrical and poised work from 1877. Grandval studied with Chopin, and Paris’s most prestigious orchestra played this concerto in her lifetime. Then it disappeared. Laura proposed bringing it back, drawn to “a relatively unknown female composer whose music is newly being rediscovered.”
Peter Maxwell Davies wrote Farewell to Stromness as a protest against a uranium mine proposed for Orkney, where he lived. Its slow walking bass carries the townspeople out of their homes, and its gentle, sometimes sad lyricism understates what the protest won: the mine was never built. Davies later said the piece had almost become a folk tune. The concert concludes with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1, a bold and youthful entry into the symphonic tradition he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. Playful in its turns and grounded in Classical form, the finale reveals the personality of a composer just beginning to make his mark.
Admission
- Tier 1: $69.00
- Tier 2: $54.00
- Tier 3: $28.00
- 21 and under: $10.00
- K–12 teacher with ID: $15.00
Thursday April 22, free: conductor Peter Bay on the program that puts Beethoven’s First Symphony in the company of Schickele’s Thurber’s Dogs.
Works on the program:
- Peter Schickele: Thurber’s Dogs
- Marie Clémence de Grandval: Oboe Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7
- Peter Maxwell Davies: Farewell to Stromness
- Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21
Peter Bay has served as conductor of Arizona Philharmonic since 2018. He is also Music Director and Conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra and Resident Conductor of the Piano Texas Festival. Bay has appeared with more than 80 orchestras, including the National, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Baltimore, and Fort Worth symphonies, and has held music-director posts with the Erie Philharmonic, Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, and several music festivals. He is also the primary conductor for Ballet Austin.
Dr. Laura Arganbright is the principal oboist of both the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra and the Arizona Philharmonic. A versatile performer, she has played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pacific Symphony, Modesto Symphony, and Jacaranda Music, among others. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Bakersfield Symphony in Oscar Navarro’s Legacy, with Arizona Philharmonic in Marcello’s Concerto in D minor, and in the world premiere of Viet Cuong’s Extra(ordinarily) Fancy.
A dedicated educator, Laura is the Oboe Teaching Artist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s YOLA program and has worked with The Harmony Project and USC’s Thornton Community Engagement Program. She maintains a competitive private studio and is active in reed-making pedagogy, having coached reed-making for oboe majors at USC.
Laura holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Southern California, where she was honored with the Brandon Mehrle Service Award. She studied with Joel Timm, Marion Kuszyk, and Lot Demeyer, and earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Arizona State University under Martin Schuring.
Related Events
