Anthony Mosakowski Concert Overture
Anthony Mosakowski Concert Overture Program Notes
It’s always exciting to introduce a piece of music to an audience for the first time, especially a work like Anthony Mosakowski’s Concert Overture, with its great energy, artistry, sense of melody and craft. The Overture, for an orchestra of single winds, varied percussion, harp, piano and full strings, opens with two ascending and energetic eruptions of sound. The instrumental color of just three instruments blooms as more instruments join in, and grows to support a humming melodic line in the cellos and solo trombone. The heart of the Overture is a sense of musical consonance, with occasional restless interruptions from material from the piece’s opening. The middle section is built up over a peaceful, canonic layering of a melody which is almost evocative of a Gregorian chant, which is played gradually less peacefully as it continues. A troubled melody emerges in the bass section, then solo bassoon, leading towards a restatement of the piece’s opening (slightly more intense) and a restatement of its lyrical optimism to the very end.