Tucson Symphony celebrates Duke Ellington; AZ Friends host Goldmund Quartet

Tucson Symphony Orchestra is celebrating the legacy of one of America’s preemminent band leaders Duke Ellington and a renowned Tucson composer with “Duke Ellington Harlem,” a concert that focuses on the waltz in all its musical glory.

It is one of two classical music concerts downtown this week.

TSO Music Director José Luis Gomez will lead the orchestra in a program anchored by Ellington’s symphonic jazz piece “Harlem.” The work, originally commissioned by Arturo Toscanini as part of a larger New York-city inspired orchestra piece, opens with this distinctive trumpet solo in which the instrument sounds like it’s saying “Harlem.” The work has strong nods to jazz intertwined with infectious big band swing rhythms.

Gomez paired “Harlem” with Johann Strauss’s gloriously fun “Die Fledermaus” Overture and Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” Waltzes with that gorgeous passage in the middle of Sequence No. 1 that will have you swaying in your seat.

One of the highlights of the concert, which the orchestra will perform twice this weekend, is likely to be Tucson native Ulysses Kay’s “Six Dances” for string orchestra that showcases six distinct dance styles — the Bohemian Schottische, the European Waltz, the Native American Round Dance, the Eastern European Polka, the Promenade that shares history with Europe and America and the playful Hungarian Galop.

Kay grew up in Tucson and earned his bachelor’s degree in music before heading to the East Coast to earn advanced degrees from the Eastman School, Columbia and Yale University. He was the first African-American composer to win the “Prix de Rome” award that allowed him to study and travel in Italy beginning in 1946. The concert ends with Ravel’s “La valse.”

Gomez will be behind the podium for the concert, which the orchestra will perform at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 18, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 20, at Tucson Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave. Tickets are $17 to $83 through ticketmaster.com.

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Arizona Friends host young Goldmund string quartet

Most classical music is old, dating back centuries not decades, but that doesn’t mean it has to sound old.

That’s kind of the philosophy hanging over the 10-year-old Goldmund Quartet, which infuses a sense of newness to very old works with polished and convincing interpretations that are flawlessly precise down to the smallest detail. And in those small details listeners discover nuances that might have escaped them or that they had forgotten until it suddenly seems to pop out of the drawn bow or plucked string from the Munich-based Goldmund — four school friends (violinists Florian Schotz and Pinchas Adt, violist Christoph Vandory and cellist Raphael Paratore) who turned their love of music-making and camaraderie into a critically-acclaimed ensemble.

You can judge for yourself when the quartet plays its first ever Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert on Wednesday, Feb. 23.

The concert opens with Schubert’s energetic Quartettsatz in C minor and keeps up the tempo with Mozart’s playful Divertimento in F major. Dvorák’s spirited String Quartet No. 12 in F major (“American”) closes out the program.

Wednesday’s concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at Leo Rich Theater, 260 S. Church Ave. Tickets are $3 for adults, $10 for students through arizonachambermusic.org