Literary Inspiration for Final OFS Concert

The last of the three concerts to be presented by the full One Found Sound (OFS) ensemble will take place a little over a week from today. The title of the program will be Wonder, and the choice of selections was inspired by literary sources of imagination. Those selections will feature a guest appearance by soprano Julie Adams, who will be the featured soloist in a performance of Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” This is a setting of excerpts from a prose poem that James Agee had written in 1938, which Barber set for voice and orchestra in 1947.

Serge Koussevitzky conducted the premiere performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and soprano Eleanor Steber. About a year later, Eileen Farrell (whose centennial is being celebrated this month) sang the first broadcast performance of the work with Bernard Herrmann conducting the CBS Symphony Orchestra; but Columbia never released that performance as a recording. Agee’s text would subsequently be incorporated as the preamble to Agee’s A Death in the Family, which would not be published until about two years after the author’s death.

The remainder of the program will consist of two compositions, one of which precedes the Barber piece and the other follows it. The earlier of these will be Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), a five-movement suite originally composed for piano duet (four hands on one keyboard). The later composition will be also be an orchestration of previously-composed music. The piece began as Caroline Shaw’s string quartet entitled “Entr’acte;” and Shaw herself prepared the arrangement for string orchestra.

This concert will take place at the end of next week on Friday, February 21, beginning at 8 p.m. The venue will be Heron Arts, which is is located in SoMa at 7 Heron Street on the block between 7th Street and 8th Street. General admission tickets are being sold for $25. Tickets may be purchased online in advance through Eventbrite. The price for tickets purchased at the door will be $30.