Conductor Nicholas Hersh was a grad student at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music when he wrote an orchestral arrangement for Queen’s monster rock hit “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
He cast the viola as the voice of the late Queen frontman Freddy Mercury and worked out a seven-minute take on the piece as an encore for a concert featuring a solo violist.
That seven minutes went viral with a video of the Indiana U student orchestra performing it.
Conductor Nicholas Hersh made his own orchestration of Clara Schumann's “4 Pièces caractéristiques.” He will lead the Tucson Symphony Orchestra in the first-ever performance.
Orchestrating, whether it’s classical works by Chopin or Handel or pop gems from Earth, Wind and Fire or Bruce Springsteen, is as much a part of Hersh’s musical life as conducting.
When he makes his Tucson Symphony Orchestra debut this weekend, he will perform the world premiere of one of his latest orchestrations, Clara Schumann’s “4 Pièces Caractéristiques,” which the 19th-century German composer wrote for solo piano between 1834 and 1836.
The work opens the second half of the TSO’s “Mendelssohn and Korngold” Masterworks concert at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive. The concert features the encore of violinist Kerson Leong, who debuted with the TSO in 2022, performing Korngold’s Violin Concerto.
Canadian violinist Kerson Leong returns to Tucson to perform Korngold’s Violin Concerto. He was here with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra in 2022.
The Korngold and world premiere are bookended by Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho: A Short Suite” from the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 5 “Reformation,” celebrating the 300th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Augsburg Confession that challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and launched Lutheranism and other Protestant movements.
The TSO will perform the concert at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 9, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 10. Tickets are $43-$88 through tucsonsymphony.org.
Spanish composer Laura Vega discusses her percussion concerto "Ángel de Luz," which the Tucson Symphony Orchestra will perform this weekend. It will be the work's U.S. premiere.
