Message from the Conductor

Dear Members and Friends of the GSO,I am very excited to have the opportunity to be part of the GSO’s 2015-2016 season. American Made is an eclectic collection of styles by American composers.   Featured are two Batavia born composers: one a professional Grammy Award winner, Gary Call Hanley; the other an up and coming student, Ross Chua.                                                                                                                                             GSO String Workshop players join the orchestra for two works: Variations on a Theme by Handel composed by the acclaimed Maurice Whitney, former composition teacher at Ithaca College; and selections from the Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban, composed by one of America’s foremost composers, John Williams. We welcome these very talented young musicians to our stage!The program opens with a wonderful piece entitled An Overture to an Unwritten Opera, by Don Gillis, a Texas born composer, who worked with Toscanni and the NBC orchestra. I will be conducting from the actual score used by Toscanni, which I obtained from the NBC Symphony Library. Also on the program is Blues in 6/8 by Milton Weinstein. Born in 1911 in Cohoes, New York, Weinstein worked in the Hollywood film industry.The program concludes with selections from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, a composition that was ground breaking in the 1950s, introducing many elements of style and rhythm not previously used in Musical Theater.Please join us for an afternoon of interesting and highly enjoyable music, created for your listening pleasure by some of America’s greatest composers!Sincerely,Bryan Eckenrode