LSO Pre-Concert Lecture

This season, Lakeside Chautauqua is partnering with the Conservatory of Music of Baldwin Wallace University and Oberlin College & Conservatory to provide a lecture prior to select Lakeside Symphony Orchestra (LSO) concerts. These talks prepare listeners to understand and enjoy the evening’s symphony concert more fully.

Join us at 6:15 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 6 in the Fountain Inn Aigler Room for a Pre-Concert Lecture with Justin Frankeny.

This lecture, titled “Harmonies at the Horizon: Exploring Compositional Beginnings & Ends by Three Historically Disparate Composers” will provide an introduction, overview and historical background to three works performed by the LSO in tonight’s concert: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G Major, No. 3, K. 216 (1775); George Walker’s Lyric for Strings (1946); and Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony No.3, op.78 (1886).

While disparate in style and compositional era, these three works are connected by the fact that each represents a beginning or end within its composer’s career.

Then 19-year-old Mozart wrote his Third Violin Concerto while in Salzburg, before he later made his big break in Vienna; Walker wrote his Lyric for Strings while still a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia; and Saint-Saëns wrote his Third Symphony with a certainty that it would be his last.

Listeners can anticipate an enlightening discussion of each work’s musical content put into historical and biographical context.

Frankeny is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History at Baldwin Wallace University for the 2023–24 academic year.

His forthcoming dissertation investigates how composers of the Cuban diaspora navigated the art world of contemporary art music amidst their experiences of migration and the rapidly changing political and economic climates of the U.S. and Cuba in the years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

More broadly, he is interested in helping listeners connect to Western art music of the 20th and 21st centuries, for which he had been called upon to write program notes for the BBC Scottish Symphony.