Steve Shipps Is Back

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Shipps's February 21 concert will feature Smetana's From My Homeland, a two-movement work similar in tone but distinct in content from his famous orchestral cycle My Homeland, and Dvorak's large-scale, deeply felt Sonata in F major. For the cognoscenti, however, the major event of the concert will be Shipps's performance of three works by Suk, a composer rarely played in this country though honored as one of the greats in his own. These are arrangements of Love Song, Suk's ardent declaration of love to Dvorak's daughter, and Melodrama, an adaptation of "The True Love of Raduz and Mahulena" (the opening movement of Suk's Fairy Tale), plus his Ballade in D minor, a virtuoso work of tremendous fire and brio. Opening the concert will be Jan Vorisek's late-classical Sonata in G major. Also on the program will be Leos Janacek's pre-apocalyptic four-movement sonata written during the First World War, and Lubos Fiser's post-apocalyptic one-movement sonata, "Hands Written after the Second World War."   

[Originally published in February, 2010.]