Annual Spring Concert May 18 Features Susanne Mentzer Singing Berlioz

For almost three decades, the DePaul Symphony Orchestra’s Joseph and Marie Grant Spring Concert has been a red-letter date on our city’s musical calendar. This year, the highly anticipated event is scheduled for May 18 at 8 p.m. at Orchestra Hall, 220 S. Michigan Ave. It is this orchestral concert that perhaps best displays the diverse population of highly gifted musicians who have been attracted to the DePaul University School of Music performance and academic programs in recent years. With its increasingly higher standards of excellence, DePaul has developed a reputation as one of the top-ranking institutions of its kind in the country.

This year’s concert, led by conductor Cliff Colnot, opens with the fourth movement from Dvorák’s Serenade For Strings, followed by Les nuits d’été, Op. 7 by Berlioz and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Internationally renowned mezzo-soprano and DePaul faculty member Susanne Mentzer is the featured soloist in the Berlioz settings of six poems by Theophile Gautier. Mentzer joined the voice faculty in the fall of 2000.

As the orchestra’s conductor since his appointment in 1997, Cliff Colnot has vastly improved the quality of the orchestra’s sound, as well as its work ethic. He views “this year’s group as clearly confident, supremely talented and full of musicality.” For Colnot, the 90-member orchestra is always a work in progress, “evolving into a more cohesive, selfless, homogeneous ensemble and a culture that becomes stronger and more prideful.”

Colnot’s own life in music has no boundaries. Embracing the worlds of classical, jazz and pop music, Colnot serves as a conductor, arranger, composer, orchestrator and commercial music entrepreneur. He holds the posts of principal conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s contemporary MusicNow series; resident conductor of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago; and principal conductor of Contempo at the University of Chicago. This spring, Colnot is being recognized for his many contributions to the musical arts in Chicago: in April he received a Merit Award from Northwestern University’s School of Music, and on May 13th he will be honored with the William Hall Sherwood Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts by Chicago’s Sherwood Conservatory of Music.

Dvorák completed the Serenade for Strings in less than two weeks in May of 1875. It was a happy and prolific time for the composer; at last he was beginning to achieve a measure of worldwide recognition for his compositions. The fourth and last movement of Opus 22 is exhilarating in mood, and anticipates the great Fifth Symphony to come.

The extraordinary songs of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été compose an anthology of pieces about love, desire and longing. These intimate works, originally written for voice with only piano accompaniment, were inspired by the composer’s chance meeting with a singer of limited talents, Marie Recio. A decade later, she would become his second wife. The soloist in this DePaul Orchestra performance, Susanne Mentzer, sang Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été on tour with Christoph Eschenbach and the Orchestre de Paris in March of 2001.

Tchaikovsky was at the peak of his creative powers when he began his Fifth Symphony in the spring of 1888. Despite his enormous popularity, he feared that his best work was behind him, and found this composition—his first symphonic score in a decade—hard-going. By the time he reached the last measures of the finale, however, Tchaikovsky admitted that “it seems to me that I have not blundered, that it has turned out well.”

The May 18 concert is free and open to the public. For tickets, which are required, please contact the Orchestra Hall Box Office at 312/294-3000 or the DePaul School of Music at 773/325-7260. This annual concert is made possible through the generous support of the family of the late Joseph Grant, a 1932 DePaul College of Law alumnus and School of Music advisory board member.