An Afternoon of 18th Century Delights
The Grimsby Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the year will be performed on Saturday, May 17th. at 3:00 p.m. at Grimsby Minster.
Entitled ‘An Afternoon of Eighteenth Century Delights’, the programme, conducted by our Music Director Susan Grant, contains pieces by the three great masters of music of the eighteenth (or indeed of any) century: Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.
The overture is Mozart’s ’Don Giovanni’, famously written between midnight and three a.m. on the morning of the opera’s premier, copied during the afternoon and handed to the orchestra just in time for them to sight-read it for the first performance. The GSO has had slightly longer to prepare, thank heaven...
The first half will be completed by Jozef Haydn’s ever-popular and ever-enjoyable Symphony No. 101, colloquially known as ‘The Clock’ because of the metronomic rhythm of its second movement.
We are promised an extra treat in the second half, a surprise piece, and the afternoon will end with Beethoven’s most light-hearted (or at least, least sombre) symphony, his first, which Susan Grant recalls was the first piece she played with the GSO under the baton of Neville Turner when she joined the orchestra as a violin player on first settling in England. The piece was premiered on March 3rd, 1800, which was technically in the eighteenth century, just – the nineteenth began on Jan 1st 1801 – and so qualifies as a ‘delight’ therefrom – to our delight, too
Tickets at the usual prices (£12 and £10, with children’s at £5) are available from the Minster itself and online from Eventbrite.com. At the time of writing, fewer than two dozen remain, so it is likely that only a very limited number, if any, will be available at the door on the day.
