Danse Macabre

Dance music is the theme and the Academy Orchestra delivers with a tango by Spanish composer Salvador Martinez Garcia, and swing music by the great American composer, Cole Porter. Award winning Israeli- Canadian superstar cellist, Daniel Hass, returns in Popper’s exciting Hungarian Rhapsody. The YAO Symp- hony continues the theme with some of the most famous dances of all time; Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance is a classic often heard in cartoons and movies, and from the composer who brought you the cradle song/ lullaby, Brahms wrote a set of 21 Hungarian Dances. The most famous, #5, was based on the csárdás “Bártfai emlék” by Hungarian composer Béla Kéler, which Brahms mistakenly thought was a traditional folksong. Finally, the Danse Macabre, also called the Dance of Death, is a tone poem based on old French superstition – According to legend, “Death” appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death calls forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (here represented by a solo violin). Today’s “Death Violinist” is the Las Vegas Philharmonics concertmaster, De Ann Latourneau. The 2018 Carol Jackson Concerto Competition winner, Daniel Kyong, will perform.