Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2024
10:00 am - 11:30 am
Listen Up: Seminars on Music is a weekly gathering of music lovers every Wednesday morning, hosted by AZMF’s Resident Artist, Josh Condon. Each session combines music history, analysis, active listening, and discussion, designed to enhance your listening experience and overall music appreciation. Listen Up covers all genres, emphasizing our common humanity across all musical styles! Coffee and refreshments provided.
SPECIAL GUEST: Dr. Elizabeth Buck, Professor of Music: Flute, Arizona State University
We continue our journey through this year’s Festival Orchestra repertoire with another piece written to highlight a particular instrument. French composer Jacque Ibert composed this Flute Concerto in 1932 for the flute virtuoso Marcel Moyse, who has been hailed as one of the greatest flautists in all of the 20th century. The piece was premiered two years later in Paris with the Orchestra of the Society of Conservatory Concerts, an orchestra run by the Paris Conservatory and featuring faculty and students together.
Ibert was known as “an eclectic” who musical style epitomized that of 1930s France: a mixture of fun, frivolity, and deep expression reminiscent of the traditional romantic concertos, with a language that was harmonically and rhythmically very contemporary–some might even say “jazzy!” Despite composing seven operas, five ballets, works for solo piano, choral works, chamber music, and scores for twenty-one films (which included collaborations with Gene Kelly and Orson Welles), Ibert’s work is lesser known – with the majority of his career spent as a conductor and music administrator for the French Academy in Rome and later the Paris Opera and Opera Comique.
Join as we explore and discuss this virtuosic work, which explore the range and depth of this special instrument!
Instructor
Josh Condon
As a pianist equally adept in the genres of jazz, pop, and classical, Josh Condon has served as music director/supervisor for over 40 musical theatre productions, in addition to leading concerts with symphony orchestras, choirs, jazz ensembles, and pop/rock bands. He has traveled the world as a music director and pianist for the Norwegian, Celebrity, and Princess Cruise Lines where he worked with numerous Broadway and West End performers.
Currently, Josh serves as Resident Artist and Director of Community Music Programs for Arizona Musicfest in Scottsdale, an organization which features concert performances of the music industry’s top talent. In addition to serving as Assistant Conductor for the Musicfest Festival Orchestra, he lectures on topics surveying a huge breadth of music history and analysis, including popular song, symphonic repertoire, jazz performance practice, musical theatre, and everything in between.
He also serves as Assistant Conductor for the North Valley Symphony Orchestra, and has appeared as Guest Conductor with the Scottsdale Symphony Orchestra, the Scottsdale Philharmonic, and the Arizona Musical Theatre Orchestra. Josh is passionate about using flexibility, positivity, and encouragement to create spaces where all can learn and perform to their best ability. He holds a BM in Jazz Studies from Ithaca College and an MM in Musical Theatre/Opera Music Direction from Arizona State University, and resides in Phoenix, AZ with his wife Lexy, their son Arlo, and their cat Sadie.