Fairfax Orchestra presents a very special concert

Alicia Curtis and Sidney Hampton of the Bowen McCauley Dance Company. [Jeff Malet]

By David Siegel

Something unique is in store for patrons of the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra. The FSO is presenting a a music and dance program “way off the beaten track,” says Christopher Zimmerman, the FSO’s conductor and music director.

The performance, on Saturday, March 9, at George Mason University, features what Zimmerman describes as a combination of  “traditional classical music with music quite removed from those specific traditions.”

The FSO is collaborating with the area’s premier contemporary dance organization, the Bowen McCauley Dance Company, whose dancers will perform alongside three of the six pieces in the music program. “The choreography will be newly created for this collaboration by their founder and artistic director, Lucy Bowen McCauley,” Zimmerman says.

The concert includes well-known works, such as the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, two short Sibelius pieces, and an arrangement of Gershwin preludes.

The performance “culminates in music by the young, provocative Turkish composer, Erberk Eryilmaz, whose two pieces ‘Concerto for Wind Instrument, Piano, Percussion, Strings and Imaginary Folk Dancers’ and ‘Dances of the Yogurt Maker’ combine the rawness and fierce rhythmic intensity of Turkish folk music with more established classical traditions,” says Zimmerman.

Eryilmaz will be at the FSO performances, both overseeing his compositions’ re-creations and performing on piano.

Macedonian clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski will be performing with the FSO. Zimmerman describes Lumanovski as “an artist of jaw-dropping technical abilities on his instruments and equally accomplished in both the classical repertoire and the folk music of his native land and its immediate neighbor, Turkey.”

The FSO concert “will be very interesting and challenging at the same time,” says Lumanovski. “There will be three totally different styles of clarinet performed in one night with three different clarinets. From the pureness of sound and expression by Mozart, to the loose and swingy mood by Gershwin, and intriguing fast-changing time signatures with exquisite orchestration by composer Eryilmaz.”

The event will also be very special for Bowen McCauley. She has danced to Sibelius in her career, so now, she says, “it’s terrific to approach the same piece as a choreographer.”

Bowen McCauley describes Eryilmaz’s “yogurt-maker” composition as a “very challenging piece . . . that’s intricate and sophisticated. Our dancers are truly enjoying the challenge. For me, it’s a privilege to work with a living composer.”

Where and when: The Fairfax Symphony Orchestra performs with special guests at George Mason University Center for the Arts, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, Saturday, March 9, at  8 p.m. Tickets are $65, $43, $39, and $25; student tickets are $15. Purchase tickets online or call 703-993-2787. Note: At 7 p.m., concert-goers are invited to a discussion with the artists and FSO Music Director Christopher Zimmerman.

This article is based on a review published in the Connection March 1.