Southern Methodist University

MEADOWS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CONCERT

September 22, 2023

Description

This all-Brahms program gives the listener two distinct views into Brahms. In Academic Festival Overture we see Brahms the joker; after accepting an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau, Brahms was required to write a piece as a thank you to the University. To fulfill his obligation, he wrote Academic Festival Overture, which used collegiate drinking songs as musical materials. 
 
Brahms’s first symphony is a more serious work. After Robert Schumann wrote that Brahms would continue “Beethoven’s inheritance,” Brahms developed a complex about writing his first symphony. The work took him 21 years to write, and in it, we see Brahms balance an homage to Beethoven with his own compositional style.