Festival Chamber Orchestra

Virtuoso violinist Ray Chen won the Yehudi Menuhin and Queen Elizabeth competitions (the only violinist to win both), wears Armani (his sponsor), and made Forbes’s 2018 list of the 30 most influential Asians under 30. The summer’s opening night includes Chen soloing in Mozart’s delightful and inventive 5th Violin Concerto, and joining Festival Assistant Concertmaster Juliana Athayde to weave together a beautiful stream of independent and overlapping melodies in Bach’s Double Violin Concerto.

Three 20th century composers riff on the styles exemplified by Bach and Mozart in the opening program. Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” evokes Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, while Prokofiev channeled Mozart and Haydn in structuring his lovely “Classical Symphony.” Ravel orchestrated his suite for small orchestra titled Le Tombeau de Couperin in a baroque style, delivering a surprisingly light-hearted memorial for friends lost in World War I.

Alasdair Neale and Principal Horn William VerMeulen both celebrate 25 years with the Festival this season, and this program pairs them up on Strauss’s fiendishly difficult Horn Concerto. Strauss wrote it for his father, who was Germany’s leading horn virtuoso. However, upon seeing the score, Strauss senior pragmatically decided to cede the glory to another player. Providing comic relief to the program, Strauss’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme offers a humorous satire on social climbing.