Assistant Conductor Stilian Kirov will lead the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in a free lunchtime concert, 12 to 1 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 21, in the City Hall lobby. Mayor Mike McGinn will welcome attendees to the performance, which will feature masterworks from the 19th and 20th centuries. The Symphony will perform Bartók’s Rumanian Folk Dances for orchestra, the first movement from Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor (featuring Amelia Sie, violin), Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, and Brahms’ Hungarian Dances No. 5 in G Minor and No. 6 in D Minor.
After the concert, audience members are invited to mingle at a post-performance coffee reception in City Hall’s Bertha Knight Landes Room. Seattle Symphony has established a tradition of performing free concerts at City Hall to standing-room-only crowds every year since 2006.
Kirov recently finished his tenure as associate conductor of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and music director of the Memphis Youth Symphony Program. He has conducted ensembles around the world, including the Orchestre Colonne (France), the Orchestra of Colours (Greece), Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra “Leopolis” (Ukraine), the Sofia Festival Orchestra and the State Hermitage Orchestra (Russia), the Thüringen Philharmonic Orchestra (Germany), the Lansing Symphony Orchestra (Michigan), the National Repertory Orchestra (Breckenridge, Colorado), the New World Symphony and the Juilliard Orchestra, among others.
Violinist Amelia Sie is well known to concert audiences in the Pacific Northwest, having made her solo debut with the Seattle Festival Orchestra at age 8. She has gone on to perform with the Seattle Symphony, Coeur d’Alene Symphony, Bellevue Philharmonic, Cascade Symphony, the Sammamish Symphony and Philharmonia Northwest. She is the 2012 winner of Seattle Young Artist’s Music Festival Concerto Competition and has been featured on National Public Radio’s “From the Top” program. Amelia, 16, is a student of Simon James and Jan Mark Sloman and works with pianist Hiro David.
This concert is presented as part of the Seattle Symphony’s Community Connections program, which is partially supported with funding from the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs and 4Culture. Special thanks to The Bank of America for their corporate support of Seattle Symphony community programs.
Image: Seattle Symphony Orchestra, courtesy Yuen Lui Studio.
