Anne Frank's Tree
Florida premiere of Anne Frank's Tree
Music of Korngold, Bond, and Mendelssohn
Thursday, March 20, 2025, 7:30pm

The Chamber Orchestra concludes its eighth season with the Florida premiere of "Anne Frank's Tree" by American composer Victoria Bond. Anne Frank's Tree is a composition for chamber orchestra and narrator by award-winning composer Victoria Bond. The work deals with the issues of anti-Semitism and racism in a constructive and engaging way, raising the profound issues of the cruelty of World War II, Nazism and anti-Semitism, and will remind people of our shared humanity.

Anne Frank's Tree was commissioned by The Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and premiered on January 20, 2024 in Indianapolis at the Schrott Center for the Arts, Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. "Anne Frank's Tree" is a musical meditation on Anne's tree as a symbol of hope. The work is written for narrator and orchestra, with narration chosen from The Diary of Anne Frank. Booker High School senior Alexa Scharf will portray Anne Frank.

"The Diary of Anne Frank has been an important book to me since I read it as a teenager," said composer Victoria Bond. "I was struck by the important role the tree that grew outside Anne's window played in her emotional life: it represented nature, beauty, freedom and hope."

Victoria Bond leads a multifaceted career as composer, conductor, lecturer, and artistic director of Cutting Edge Concerts. Her compositions have been praised by The New York Times as "powerful, stylistically varied and technically demanding."

Ms. Bond has composed eight operas, six ballets, two piano concertos and orchestral, chamber, choral and keyboard compositions. Bond's opera, Clara, based on the life of composer and pianist Clara Schumann, premiered at the Berlin Philharmonic Easter Festival in Baden-Baden, Germany in 2019.

Ms. Bond is the recipient of the Victor Herbert Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Walter Hinrichsen Award, the Perry F. Kendig Award and the Miriam Gideon Prize. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from Hollins and Roanoke Colleges, and Washington and Lee University, and was voted Woman of the Year, Virginia in 1990 and 1991.

The concert will open with a suite from Erich Korngold's "Much Ado About Nothing". The suite is drawn from incidental music Korngold wrote for a production of Shakespeare's play. Korngold was a very popular young composer in 1920. After the production was revived in 1920, Korngold extracted the concert suite for chamber orchestra from the score.

Concluding the concert and the season will be a performance of Felix Mendelssohn's great Violin Concerto in E Minor with virtuoso violinist George Maxman.

Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto is one of the most beloved symphonic works ever written. The concerto was a gift of friendship to a musician particularly close to Mendelssohn's heart: violinist Ferdinand David, who was Mendelssohn's concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

The concerto has many innovative touches: in the first movement, this is no orchestral introduction, and the written-out cadenza occurs before the recapitulation instead of at the end. The concerto proceeds without pause to the second movement, linked to the first by a single bassoon note. A brief bridge passage leads directly to the quick-silver finale, filled with the fairy-music and high spirits of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" which Mendelssohn composed nearly 20 years earlier.

Violinist George Maxman was born in Moscow, Russia. He studied in the Moscow Conservatory, Completing his study in Violin Performance under the tutelage of David Oistrakh. During his time at the conservatory, Mr. Maxman also studied Piano and Composition with Dmitri Kabelevsky. His international career has included Artist-in-Residence at the University of Sydney, Acting Assistant Concertmaster of the Houston Symphony, concertmaster and assistant conductor of the Symphony Nova Scotia, and a career and violinist and teacher in Shanghai.

Program

Much Ado About Nothing, Suite Erich Korngold
Anne Frank's Tree Victoria Bond
Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 Felix Mendelssohn