LANCASTER––The Northern Neck Orchestra (NNO) will open its 2025-26 season October 4 with selections honoring the 150th birthday anniversary of British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an enduring tribute to a visit to America by Antonin Dvorak and the music of Louise Farrenc, a ground-breaking 19th century French woman pianist and composer whose music only recently entered the concert repertoire.
The NNO will perform under the direction of conductor Michael Repper in the Lancaster Elementary School Theater, 191 School Street, Kilmarnock. The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m., after Repper’s 6:45 p.m. pre-concert presentation.
Admission is by season subscription or $40. Tickets may be purchased at www.northernneckorchestra.org or the door. Students are free with an online reservation.
The concert will open with Farrenc’s “Overture No. 1” in E minor, Opus 23, written in 1834. Along with her husband, she began performing concerts throughout Europe in 1821.
Farrenc endured years of bias against female musicians. She was appointed as professor of piano at the Conservatoire in 1842, becoming the only woman musician in the 19th Century to achieve that standing.
Just Farrenc’s chamber music and her two piano trios had entered the repertoire until her two overtures from 1834 and three symphonies from the 1840s finally were performed in Paris.
The concert will continue with the Virginia premiere of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Suite From Five Negro Melodies,” derived from the composer’s expansive “24 Negro Melodies.” Both are built around a foundation of melodies inspired by African-American folk music, in particular spirituals.
The five melodies are I’m Troubled in Mind; Don’t Be Weary, Traveler; Song of Conquest; They Will Not Lend Me a Child; and Oloba. All are included in Repper’s album of music by Coleridge-Taylor, which features world premiere recordings of the prolific composer.
The album commemorates the 150th birthday of Coleridge-Taylor. It features six-time Grammy Award-nominated violinist Curtis Stewart and the National Philharmonic conducted by Repper. Signed CDs will be available for $10.
The concert will conclude with Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.”
By the 1870s, Dvorak had emerged as a leading composer throughout much of Europe and his reputation had spread to America. The founder of the National Conservatory in New York, Jeanette Thurber, selected Dvorak to help establish the conservatory as a progressive institution with an international reputation.
