LEWISTON – In his last performance with the Bates College Orchestra, Philip Carlsen will conduct the ensemble in a program of music by Haydn, Wagner and Copland at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 12, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. The concert is free and open to the public.

Carlsen resumes his full-time faculty position at the University of Maine at Farmington after this academic year. For the past two years he split his time between Farmington and Bates, and the year prior was at Bates full time.

The 35-member orchestra will perform Haydn’s Horn Concerto No. 1 in D, featuring soloist Amy Saffer, a Bates senior, as well as Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.”

Saffer of Stow, Mass., is a psychology major. She has played with the Bates College Orchestra for four years and been principal horn for three. She has also performed with the Androscoggin Valley Community Orchestra, Bates College Choir Orchestra and the Bates brass and woodwind quintets.

Wagner composed the “Siegfried Idyll” as a birthday surprise for his wife, Cosima, and named it after their infant son.

For more information phone 207-786-6135.

Having prepared the piece in secret, Wagner and his musicians first performed its as Cosima was waking up on Christmas.

morning in 1870. Intimate, calm and lyrical – an expression of the composer’s newfound domestic happiness – “Siegfried Idyll” is Wagner’s most popular orchestral piece.

With its highlight a theme adapted from the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” “Appalachian Spring” also has idyllic connotations for many, symbolizing a kind of pastoral optimism that’s distinctly American. Subtitled “Ballet for Martha,” it was written to accompany a ballet by the choreographer Martha Graham and was first performed at the Library of Congress in 1944.

For more information phone 207-786-6135.

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