DePauw Orchestra and choirs conclude season on Sunday

For its annual year-end choir and orchestra concert, DePauw School of Music will present Brahms’s “Song of Fate” on Sunday, May 7 at 3 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium. Orcenith Smith, the orchestra’s music director, will conduct the final performance of the school’s 2022-23 concert season, which also features DePauw’s 2023 Concerto Competition winners Grant Jackson, Frances Wycoff and Levi Stewart as soloists.

Courtesy photo/SUZANNE HASSLER

For the culmination of DePauw University’s 2022–23 concert season, conductor Orcenith Smith will lead the combined DePauw Symphony Orchestra and Putnam County Festival Choir in a performance of Johannes Brahms’s “Schicksalslied” (Song of Fate), inspired by the writings of the poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin.

The joint concert will be presented Sunday, May 7 at 3 p.m. in the Green Center’s Kresge Auditorium.

The one-hour program will open with Bernstein’s overture to the opera “Candide,” followed by winners of the school’s annual concerto competition as soloists on their winning concerto entry.

Senior Levi Stewart will perform the first movement of the Pierre Max Dubois alto sax concerto, and juniors Frances Wycoff will sing “The Snow Maiden’s Aria” by Rimsky-Korsakov and Grant Jackson will sing Figaro’s aria “Non Più Andrai” from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.”

The graduating seniors’ final performance at DePauw concludes with Brahms’s eloquent, yet dramatic “Song of Fate,” prepared by interim choral director Pam Blevins Hinkle and conducted by Smith.

According to the conductor, whereas Brahms found Hölderlin’s poetry quick to suggest choral music with instrumental support, he struggled with bringing the work to a conclusion and set it aside for years when not able to find a good ending.

“It was only after a friend suggested that he return to the peaceful mood of the first part,” he observed, “that he completed the project in 1871.

“Our choral students and orchestral musicians are excited to perform this profound and ultimately hopeful work as it completes their year,” Smith concluded.

Tickets to the choir and orchestra concert, which are free, can be obtained online at https://dpugreencenter.eventbrite.com, or in person at the Green Center box office, beginning 90 minutes prior to the performance.