2009-2010 Season Calendar

Hand-selected wines set the mood for this annual favorite. Wine experts from McKnight & Carlson will be on hand to answer questions and give tips. Live and silent auctions and Becket’s tantalizing wine taster’s dinner menu top off this exciting evening. Tickets to Tasting and Dinner are $75 each; Pre-Tasting Premiere Event tickets are an additional $25 each. Please contact the Water City Chamber Orchestra office for tickets.

• Pre-Tasting Premiere Event:
  6:00 pm to 7:00 pm
• Wine Opus Tasting and Dinner:
  6:30 pm to 10:30 pm

A brilliant virtuoso program full of color and style! Engage in Beethoven’s dramatic Leonore Overture, "dance" to Prokofiev’s energetic and tuneful Classical Symphony, and revel in the drama and virtuosity of Ravel’s Tzigane, performed by acclaimed violinist Jubal Fulks. Leave happy, and yes! - humming the tunes from Stravinsky’s spirited and colorful Pulcinella Suite. A dazzling ending to a lively opening night!

• Beethoven: Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b
• Ravel: Tzigane
• Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 Classical Symphony
• Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite

A festival guaranteed to lift your holiday spirit! Opening with the outstanding Oshkosh Youth Symphony conducted by Geri Grine, the festival continues with viola virtuoso Matthew Michelic performing Vaughan Williams Suite for Viola & Orchestra. Benjamin Britten’s Variations on a Christmas Carol: Men of Goodwill promises an engaging and exciting orchestral expose based on the familiar carol. Choral works and audience voices fill the auditorium, with Composer-in-Residence Brooke Joyce's Veni, Veni Emmanuel, a carol sing-along, and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Madrigal groups from West, North and Lourdes High Schools will join in the holiday mood.

• Vaughan Williams: Suite for Viola & Small Orchestra
• Britten: Men of Goodwill; Variations on a Christmas Carol
• Brooke Joyce: Veni, Veni Emmanuel (2009)
• Carol Sing-along, Handel: "Hallelujah" Chorus

Join the WCCO strings for a Sunday Serenade at the First Congregational Church’s beautiful and acoustically resonant space. Featured are Ben Brecher, tenor, and Bruce Atwell, Oshkosh’s own magnificent horn player in the hauntingly beautiful Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings by Benjamin Britten, with lyrics drawn from Shakespeare and other well known English texts. Osvaldo Golijov’s brisk, tango-inspired Last Round opens the concert. The orchestra acts as an idealized bandoneon, a small accordion-like instrument essential for any Tango ensemble, the first movement representing the violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh. The popular Serenade for Strings, which Tchaikovsky describes as "a piece from the heart," lends a romantic ending to what promises to be a truly memorable afternoon!

• Osvaldo Golijov: Last Round (1996)
• Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31
  
• Tchaikovsky: Serenade for Strings, Op. 48

Experience the piquant, dance-inspired music of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, a superb orchestral suite that shows off the virtuosity of the WCCO players. Eli Kalman adds his own virtuosity to Composer-in-Residence Brooke Joyce’s reflective and colorful October Skies, a concertino for piano & orchestra. Mendelssohn’s popular masterwork, the Symphony #4, Italian, inspired by the composer’s travels in Italy, brings the season to a spirited, sunny close.

• Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin
• Brooke Joyce: October Skies, Concertino for piano & chamber orchestra (2005)
• Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 in A major Italian