Saturday, October 6, 8 p.m.
Adler Theatre, 136 East Third Street, Davenport IA
Sunday, October 7, 2 p.m.
Augustana College's Centennial Hall, 3703 Seventh Avenue, Rock Island IL
Presented in conjunction with the Figge Art Museum's eagerly awaited exhibition French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850 – 1950, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra opens its 2018-19 season of Masterworks concerts with a program fittingly titled French Moderns – an evening of glorious compositions by Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Ravel boasting a challenging and gorgeous solo played by renowned flutist John McMurtery.
With his professional credits including positions as section flutist for the New York City Opera Orchestra, principal flutist for the Peoria Symphony, and professor of flute at Western Illinois University, McMurtery has also served as guest principal flutist with the Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. In January of 2017, he participated in the Chicago Symphony's tour of Europe with Maestro Riccardo Muti, having previously served as principal flutist with the Opera Orchestra of New York, the Crested Butte Festival Orchestra, the Dicapo Opera, and the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra. McMurtery has also performed regularly with the Detroit Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, and at the OK Mozart festival in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
As a soloist, McMurtery has appeared with the New York Symphonic Ensemble in Japan, the Peoria Symphony, Artemis Chamber Ensemble, and Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, and has appeared as guest artist at flute festivals in Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee. For the QCSO's season-opening Masterworks concert, McMurtery will take the lead on Claude Debussy's haunting Syrinx for solo flute, enabling audiences to experience the musical talents praised by critics nationwide. In a concert review for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini wrote that the flute solo Carceri d'Invenzione Iib “was played brilliantly by John McMurtery,” exploring “the extreme high and low registers of the instrument, and zapping back and forth at hyperspeed.”
With the Handel Oratorio Society's and Augustana Choral Arts' Jon Hurty serving as the program's director, the latest QCSO repertoire will feature two Debussy works in addition to the Syrinx: the iconic musical tone poem Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and the fluid, atmospheric Noctures. And rounding out the program will be a noted collaboration between Modest Mussorgsky and Maurice Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite of 10 individual pieces composed by Mussorgsky and arranged by Ravel.
French Moderns will be performed at the Adler Theatre at 8 p.m. on October 6 and at Augustana College's Centennial Hall at 2 p.m. on October 7, admission is $8-62 on Saturday and $8-39 on Sunday, and more information and tickets are available by calling (563)322-7276 or visiting QCSO.org.
