Sinfonia

Conductor: Barney Blough

Barney Blough holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Performance from Central Washington University, a Teaching Certificate from Seattle Pacific University, and a Professional Certificate from Pacific Lutheran University. He has served as Music Director of the Seattle Chamber Orchestra, Assistant Conductor of the Rainier Symphony, and Assistant Conductor of the Lake Union Civic Orchestra. Learn more.

Contact Barney Blough at sinfonia@byso.org

Messages from the Conductor

Details for the concert on Monday, May 13:

• Chamber ensemble call time is 5:00. Please be ready to go on stage at 5:25. You will only have 5 minutes, so if you are late you will not get to warm up on stage!
• Orchestra call time is 5:30 pm. Please arrive early so that you have time to unpack and warm up before we take the stage at 5:55.
• The Concert starts at 7:00 pm.
• The Location is Sammamish High School in Bellevue.
• Concert attire can be found through our BYSO main page links.

Here is a link to the Frankfurt Radio Symphony performing Franck’s Symphony in D Minor

Here is a list of the video timings as they relate to our arrangement:

• Beginning – :46
• A – 2:04
• B – 3:04
• C – 6:08
• D – 6:20
• G – 7:08
• H – 7:26
• I – 11:45
• J – 14:53
• M – 16:57
• O – 17:23

SINFONIA ORCHESTRA Program Notes

Joseph Boulogne Saint-Georges was a French composer and violinist. Also known as Chavalier de Saint-Georges, he was born near Basse-Terre on the island of Guadeloupe in the West Indies around the year 1739 and died in Paris in 1799. He was the son of a white general controller of Guadeloupe and a native Guadeloupe woman. Although details about Saint-Georges early years are vague, it is known that his family moved to Paris when he was about ten years old. As a youngster, he excelled in various sports and became an award-winning swordsman. However, he also studied violin and performed as a soloist, orchestral violinist, and conductor, and he felt his true calling was in music. He did a great deal of composing, including comic operas, orchestral music, chamber music, and songs. Sinfonia in D was adapted from the overture to one of his stage productions “L’amant anonyme,” a comedy with ballets first produced in 1780 with moderate success. This overture, featuring three movements utilizing the typical fast-slow-fast sequence, made it suitable for Saint-Georges to easily adapt it into an orchestral symphony.

Born in 1822, César Franck first won acclaim as a child prodigy and matured as a composer very late in life. An isolated figure for many years despite an early career as a piano virtuoso, he had become more famous as an organist than as a composer. However, Franck was revered by a small group of younger musicians that included Ernest Chausson, and Vincent d’Indy, who proclaimed him France’s answer to Beethoven and Wagner. They urged him to produce his own contribution to the grand symphonic genre in 1877, and he began work on the Symphony in D minor at age 65. Although Franck called it a symphony in response to his students, who quite literally demanded that he try his hand at the form, it is not so much a work in the tradition of Beethoven as a hybrid characteristic of Franck, combining elements of both symphony and symphonic poem in a thematically unified whole. It was cyclical, meaning that certain musical materials were not restricted to individual movements but could be heard through the entire work. The symphony is by far the best-known of Franck’s orchestral works, and the three-note motif of the first movement echoes the famous questioning motto “Muss es sein” (Must it be?) in Beethoven’s last string quartet. The entire score of the Symphony in D Minor is saturated with this theme.