The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as part of its Music for Maryland summer touring season, returns to Chesapeake College’s Todd Performing Arts Center for the first time since 2016.
The Music for Maryland series opens July 8 with a concert at Harford Community College’s APG Federal Credit Union Arena, then makes its first Eastern Shore appearance at Elkton High School auditorium on July 21 with a program leading off with Mozart’s “Magic Flute” Overture.
The Chesapeake College concert, the first since Marin Alsop, now the BSO music director emeritus, conducted the orchestra in its 100th anniversary season with a program of the classic of classics, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), and the Oboe Concerto by Christopher Rouse, then still a living composer. (He died in 2019.)
For nearly two decades to that time, the BSO had played at Chesapeake College every year until interrupted by scheduling cutbacks, in part due to lengthy contract negotiations with its musicians, the emergence of the Delmarva’s own Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, and later by COVID restrictions.
This makes the July 29th Wye Mills 29 concert an on-the-road return homecoming for the BSO. Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser conducts a repertoire beginning with Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance, Op. 72, No. 7 in C major, followed by the third movement of belatedly celebrated African-American composer Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1, followed by Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from “Eugene Onegin,” Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, Piazzolla’s “Summer” from “Four Seasons in Buenos Aires” and capped by the rousing fourth movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
The Music for Maryland BSO tour covers nine of the state’s 23 counties representing every geographic region from the Shore to St. Mary’s in southern Maryland on Aug. 5, with the finale in mountainous Garrett County on Aug. 6.
By the way, tickets are a Pay-What-You-Wish bargain or a suggested $10 donation. The concert starts at 730 PM.
Where can we get tickets to the Todd?