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Orchestra Seattle | Seattle Chamber Singers: Passion + Enchantment

Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, conductor

Mendelssohn:A Midsummer Night's Dream
Brahms: Liebeslieder Waltzes
Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn

Guest conductor Stephen Rogers Radcliffe, music director of the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra since 2006, has conducted orchestras on four continents, produced recordings of operatic, orchestral and chamber music works, and fostered the development of audiences through innovative educational and artistic programs.

Radcliffe leads OSSCS in Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, beginning with the overture composed at age 17 that George Grove deemed "the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music." Mendelssohn's celebrated scherzo and familiar wedding march alternate with rarely heard selections for solo vocalists and women's voices.

Brahms composed his famed Liebeslieder Waltzes for chorus and piano four-hands, but later orchestrated the accompaniment to several of them himself. He initially composed his set of variations on a theme then attributed to Haydn for two pianos. Only after playing through the two-piano version with Clara Schumann did Brahms orchestrate the work, which, musicologist John Horton has noted, "incorporate almost every conceivable device of contrapuntal ingenuityone can only marvel how Brahms emulates and even surpasses Bach."