Boston’s Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra Opens Season with ‘Surviving and Thriving’
NEWTON, Mass.—Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra opens its season at First Baptist Church of Newton on Sat., Oct. 31 at 8 p.m. Principal conductor Kevin Rhodes conducts the program, which includes two works by Armenian composers in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
The orchestra is honored to present the East Coast premiere of Tigran Mansurian’s “Concerto for Violin and Cello” with guest soloists Ruggero Allifranchini, violin, and Suren Bagratuni, cello. Allifranchini, a native of Milan, serves as associate concertmaster of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and as concertmaster of the Mostly Mozart Festival, and was a founding member of the Borromeo String Quartet. The Mansurian piece is close to the heart of Armenian-born Bagratuni, a past silver medal winner of the Tchaikovsky competition and a former student and faculty member at New England Conservatory. He has enjoyed a distinguished international career and is currently an artist-in-residence and professor of cello at Michigan State University.
The duo serves as two-thirds of the trio Nobilis and has previously performed this particular work to great acclaim. Hovhannes’ “Prayer of St. Gregory” is a powerful prayer and features Pro Arte principal trumpet Dana Russian. Composed in 1946, this elegiac piece for trumpet and strings pays homage to Gregory the Illuminator, the first official head of the Armenian Apostolic Church and patron saint of Armenia.
To complement these profoundly moving pieces, the orchestra will perform the emotionally charged “Eroica Symphony.” With this groundbreaking piece, Beethoven launched the “heroic” middle period of his career; as music historian Christopher H. Gibbs writes, “Its unprecedented length, technical challenges, and uncompromising aesthetic stance seemed to aim beyond entertainment, forcing Beethoven’s contemporaries to rethink what a symphony should be and do.”
