• WPO Home
    • What's new on this site...
    • WPOtunes
  • 2022-2023 Season
    • Fall Concert - October 23, 2022 >
      • Program Notes: Fall Concert 2022
      • Musicians Fall Concert 2022
    • Spring Concert - April 23, 2023 >
      • Musicians Spring Concert 2023
    • Strings of Joy: 2022-2023
    • Media coverage/Press releases: 2022-2023
    • Welcome Notes 2022-2023
  • About / Contact
    • Board and Staff >
      • Susan Davenny Wyner Biography
      • Michael Gelfand Biography
    • Partners
    • Bodor tribute
    • Kurtz tribute
  • Tickets / Support
    • Subscriptions: 2022-2023
    • Patrons: 2022-2023
    • Program Advertisers: 2022-2023
    • In-kind Support: 2022-2023
    • Endowment Fund
  • History
    • 2021-2022 Season >
      • Paige & Byrnes Centennial Concert - September 11, 2021 >
        • Musicians: Paige & Byrnes Concert
      • Fall Concert - October 24, 2021 >
        • Musicians Fall Concert 2021
      • Spring Concert - April 24, 2022 >
        • Musicians Spring Concert 2022
        • Program Notes: Spring Concert 2022
      • Media coverage/Press releases: 2021-2022
      • Subscriptions: 2021-2022
      • Patrons: 2021-2022
      • In-kind Support: 2021-2022
      • Program Advertisers: 2021-2022
    • 2020-2021 Season >
      • Fall Concert - October 4, 2020
      • Susan Davenny Wyner Notes for 2020-2021
      • Subscriptions: 2020-2021
      • Patrons: 2020-2021
      • Program Advertisers: 2020-2021
      • Media coverage/Press releases: 2020-2021
    • 2019-2020 Season >
      • Fall Concert - October 6, 2019 >
        • Program Notes: Fall Concert 2019
        • Musicians: Fall Concert 2019
      • Spring Concert - April 19, 2020
      • Student Concerts: 2019
      • Art in Music Contest: Fall 2019
      • Strings of Joy: 2020
      • Susan Davenny Wyner Notes for 2019-2020
      • Subscriptions: 2019-2020
      • Patrons: 2019-2020
      • In-kind Support: 2019-2020
      • Program Advertisers: 2019-2020
      • Media coverage/Press releases: 2019-2020
    • 2018-2019 Season >
      • Fall Concert - October 6, 2019 >
        • Musicians: Fall Concert 2018
      • Spring Concert - April 19, 2020 >
        • Program Notes: Fall Concert 2019
        • Musicians: Spring Concert 2019 >
          • Karen Clark-Green Biography
      • Student Concert: 2018
      • Strings of Joy: 2018-2019
      • Art in Music Contest: Spring 2019
      • Yo-Yo Ma performance in Warren
      • Patrons: 2018-2019
      • Program Advertisers: 2018-2019
      • In-kind Support: 2018-2019
      • Media coverage/Press releases: 2018-2019
    • 2017-2018 Season >
      • Fall Concert - November 19, 2017-dup >
        • Program Notes: Fall Concert 2017
        • Musicians: Fall Concert 2017
      • Spring Concert - April 22, 2018 >
        • Program Notes: Spring 2018 Concert
        • Musicians: Spring Concert 2018
      • Youth Outreach Campaign 2017-2018
      • Strings of Joy: 2017-2018
      • Art in Music Contest: 2017
      • Student Concerts: 2017
      • Patrons: 2017-2018
      • Program Advertisers: 2017-2018
      • In-kind Support: 2017-2018
      • WPO Fundraiser at the Phillips Home, September 2017
      • Upscale Garage Sale, April 27-29, 2018
      • Subscriptions: 2017-2018
      • Media coverage/Press releases: 2017-2018
    • 2016-2017 Season >
      • Fall Concert - October 30, 2016 >
        • Musicians: Spring Concert 2019
      • Spring Concert - April 30, 2017
      • Art in Music Contest: 2016
      • Strings of Joy: 2016-2017
      • Big Chuck and Lil' John Fundraiser, May 20, 2017
      • Media coverage/Press releases: 2016-2017
      • Patrons: 2016-2017
      • Program Advertisers: 2016-2017
      • Subscriptions: 2016-2017
      • In-kind Support: 2016-2017
    • 50th Celebration >
      • 50th Anniversary Fund Contributors
      • An Evening of 50 Years of Music
      • Roaring Twenties Gala
    • 2015-2016 Season >
      • Fall Concert - November 1, 2015
      • Spring Concert - April 17, 2016 >
        • Musicians: Spring Concert 2016
      • Strings of Joy: 2016
      • Art in Music Contest: 2015
      • Student Concerts: 2015 >
        • 2015 Concert Teacher Notes
      • 2014-2015 Season >
        • Fall Concert - November 9, 2014 >
          • Program Notes: Fall Concert 2014
          • Musicians: Fall Concert 2014
        • Spring Concert - April 12, 2015 >
          • Program Notes: Spring Concert 2015
          • Musicians: Spring Concert 2015
        • Student Concerts: 2014 >
          • 2014 Concert Teacher Notes
        • Art in Music Contest: 2014
        • Strings of Joy: 2014-2015
        • Patrons: 2014-2015
        • Program Advertisers: 2014-2015
        • Major Gifts: 2014-2015
        • In-kind Support: 2014-2015
        • WPO Fundraiser at Hartford Hill Winery, May 2015 >
          • Silent Auction: May 1, 2015
      • Patrons: 2015-2016
      • Program Advertisers: 2015-2016
      • Major Gifts: 2015-2016
      • In-kind Support: 2015-2016
      • Media coverage/Press releases: 2015-2016
      • Upscale Online Attic Sale, April 25-May 13, 2016
      • Upscale Online Attic Sale, April 25-May 13, 2016

Susan Davenny Wyner welcome notes for WPO's 2020-2021 season

PicturePhoto credit: Bill Mullane

​    Welcome to the 55th season of Warren's award-winning professional orchestra. This year's programs promise delights and surprises. The orchestra's extraordinary musicians will bring music from the 18th to the 21st century gloriously to life.

    In these difficult and frightening times, music has the power to reach deep in us – to touch on rich emotions, to transport us to different worlds and senses of time. Live performance draws us together as a community as we are caught up in the beauty and adventure of the moment. The Warren Philharmonic's programs this season highlight the extraordinary skills and virtuosity of our musicians and feature a wide range of music from the 1700s up to works just written.
 
    Our fall concert spirits us over to Paris for four thrilling and very different musical adventures. We start in 1778 with the 22-year-old Mozart who greets us with his new Paris symphony. It is filled with such wit and quicksilver brilliance that its first listeners gasped and broke into applause while it was being played.
 
    Some 116 years later, Debussy lures us into a delicately sensual world with his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and in Fêtes, he evokes a colorful, swirling festival in the Bois de Boulogne. Our Paris adventure closes with Stravinsky's magnificent Firebird Suite – music he created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to perform at the Paris Opera in 1910. Based on a Russian legend of a magical Firebird, the piece exploits dazzling orchestral sonorities to characterize its exotic characters. We celebrate our return home with the Ohio premiere of Pulse, an intriguing and irresistible piece created in 2003 by Cleveland-based American composer Margaret Brouwer.
 
    I am excited to welcome Grammy winning guitarist Jason Vieaux to our spring concert and to present a hot off the page work by Augusta Read Thomas, a striking American composer and Pulitzer Prize finalist, who was selected Chicago's person of the year in 2016. Her music has been described as coming 'out of a magician’s hat...playful and subtle... music that conjures.' Its American inflections create a stunning contrast to Rodrigo's famous guitar concerto with its catchy, lilting Spanish rhythms.
 
    The concert opens and closes with masterpieces by Mendelssohn and Bizet, each written when the composer was only 17 years old! I thought it would be intriguing to begin with Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, written in 1826. Its mysterious opening chords quickly give way to Shakespeare's skittering, dancing fairies, the young lovers theme, the 'hee-hawing' of Bottom; the piece is a marvel of construction and skill while it evokes its poetic magic. Bizet's brilliant 1855 Symphony, which closes the concert, lay in a drawer forgotten until almost a hundred years later when it was discovered and performed!

---Susan Davenny Wyner
Music Director/Conductor
​Warren Philharmonic Orchestra

This page was last revised on June 26, 2020.
Copyright 2023 - Warren Symphony Society DBA Warren Philharmonic Orchestra
P.O. Box 8507, Warren, OH 44484-0507            Office: 154 North Park Avenue, Warren, OH 44481-1104
Phone: 330-399-3606            Email: warren.philharmonic@gmail.com