maestro's note: on the founding of the heartland festival orchestra

A comment from the new Artistic Director and Conductor of the HFO, David Commanday.

  It gives me great pleasure to salute the creation of the Heartland Festival Orchestra and to acknowledge with gratitude my designation as its founding Artistic Director and Conductor.  To me, this represents an opportunity to make music with my longtime friends and colleagues, the finest players of the region, and to thank this wonderful community of music lovers who have demonstrated such loyalty and support.  The HFO is a chamber orchestra with a mission to make great music, and in so doing also to benefit the charitable institutions that serve our community.

  Our inaugural performance will take place on August 28, 2009, at Washington Five Points.  I call the program "Favorites and Friends," because it is composed of musical favorites (mostly Mozart!), and everyone on the stage will be friends.  Our very special guest will be an artist who is well known to the region, my dear friend and distinguished colleague Antonio Pompa-Baldi.  Antonio has made an international name for himself since his first visit here in 2003, and he will join us in a performance of Mozart's superb Piano Concerto in A major, K. 488.  We open the concert with Rossini's effervescent overture to Il Signor Bruschino, followed by Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings. The program will also include a perennial favorite throughout the world; the serenade by Mozart known as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

  The style of our concerts will be informal, spontaneous, and original, and always welcoming to the entire family.  The orchestra will vary in size, sometimes being quite small, in the spirit of chamber music, and sometimes increasing in number for special occasions and projects.  Each of our concerts will include commentary and conversation about the music and its history, and may sometimes feature observations and perspectives from the players as well.  We intend to present our audiences with a concert experience that is musically outstanding, refreshingly new, and fun to attend.

  We hope that, like us, you are looking forward to upcoming announcements of the dates and repertoire for the rest of our inaugural season.