Arizona Pro Arte Opens Summer Season with "A Pilgrimage to Beethoven" at Tempe Center for the Arts

PHOENIX - May 25, 2013 - PRLog -- On June 15, 2013, Arizona Pro Arte arrives at its new home at the Tempe Center for the Arts for an orchestral experiment as bold and fresh as their first season: a summer classical concert series.

It is practically law in the arts world that orchestras, opera companies and theater troupes bring down the curtain, turn off the house lights and shutter their operations for the summer months — particularly in Phoenix, where summer means something more than most places. But Timothy Verville, artistic director and conductor of Arizona Pro Arte, doesn’t see any reason that tradition should continue. “Audiences in the Valley shouldn’t have to put their passion for great music away for three months,” says Verville. “The Tempe Center for the Arts is filled with very cool air for the summer, and we want to fill it with very cool music, too.”

Arizona Pro Arte raises the curtain on its summer season with a program titled “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven,” featuring monumental works by two titans of European romanticism, Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner. “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven” will be presented for one performance only, Saturday evening, June 15, at 7:30 p.m. in the Studio theater of the Tempe Center for the Arts.

The tale has become legend, but it is no less true. Richard Wagner, who in the late 19th century would revolutionize orchestral music, opera, even the size and instrumentation of the orchestra itself, worshipped Ludwig van Beethoven. So inspired was he, though their lives overlapped by only a few years, that the young Wagner undertook an exhausting and dangerous journey on foot just to meet Beethoven before his death. Beethoven’s popularity had faded by the time of their meeting, but Wagner would not — and never would be — swayed by popular opinion. Wagner was deeply affected by meeting the man he called “Saint Beethoven,” and later titled a collection of his own essays “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven.”

Arizona Pro Arte pays tribute to Wagner’s patron saint with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. Called the Pastoral Symphony, it paints musical landscapes of some of the very countryside scenes Wagner may have strode past on his journey to Vienna. (The Pastoral is a favorite with modern audiences since its appearance in the Disney animated masterpiece, Fantasia.)

Wagner incorporated pastoral sounds of his own in his Siegfried Idyll, a chamber-orchestra birthday present to his wife that portrays scenes of their life together, including an orange sunrise and the song of their pet bird. A drastic contrast is offered by the very-unpastoral Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, which showcases Wagner and his orchestra at the height of their breathtaking power.

Arizona Pro Arte’s Cool Classics series is offered as a musical thank-you to the audiences who made the orchestra’s first season a resounding success, and who enthusiastically asked for more. “We heard you,” says Verville. “Now come hear us.”

All performances in the Cool Classics series take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Studio theater of the Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 West Rio Salado Parkway on the south shore of Tempe Town Lake. “A Pilgrimage to Beethoven” opens the series on June 15. July 20 brings the second concert in the series, “The Czech Connection,” and August 24, “Two Greats.” TCA will also be APA’s performance home for the 2013–14 season.

Information about Arizona Pro Arte’s Cool Classics is available at http://www.azproarte.org/. Tickets will be available for sale at http://tca.ticketforce.com/ or at the Tempe Center for the Arts box office.