Marshunda Smith, Music Director

May 9, 2026 | Chelmsford Senior Center, Chelmsford, MA | 2 pm

Featuring:
Yeonjoo Melody Oh, Solo Violin
Jeanne Salender Memorial Competition Winner
NSquared Dance
Resident Guest Artists, 2025-26 Season
Youth String Play-In Participants

PROCESSION OF THE NOBLES (from Mlada)
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) | composed 1890

Originally part of Mlada, an opera-ballet about a Slavic princess who returns from the dead -- a collaborative project Rimsky-Korsakov worked on with three other Russian
composers. The Procession was extracted from the larger work and has marched on its own ever since.

IN A PERSIAN MARKET (Intermezzo Scene)
Albert Ketèlbey (1875-1959) | composed 1920
With NSquared Dance

Ketèlbey subtitled it "Intermezzo Scene." A whole story plays out in six minutes: a caravan arrives, beggars sing "Baksheesh, Allah," a princess passes carried by servants, jugglers and snake-charmers perform, trumpets announce a caliph, a muezzin calls to prayer, and the caravan moves on. Listen for each scene -- and watch NSquared bring them to life.

FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN
Aaron Copland (1900-1990) | composed 1942

Composed during World War II for the Cincinnati Symphony. Eighteen American composers were asked to write fanfares that season; Copland's is the only one still widely
performed. He titled it deliberately: not for kings, not for armies, but for the common man.

LONDON SUITE
Eric Coates (1886-1957) | composed 1932

  I.   Covent Garden
  II.  Westminster
  III. Knightsbridge

Three musical postcards of London. The final movement, "Knightsbridge March," became one of the most-recognized melodies in Britain when the BBC chose it as the theme
music for the radio program In Town Tonight -- a show that ran for twenty-four years.

-- INTERMISSION --

IDYLL, Op. 44
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) | composed 1901

A piece almost no one alive has heard -- there is no commercial recording. Coleridge-Taylor reworked it from a movement of his student-day symphony originally titled  "Lament." He removed the title, revised the orchestration, added parts for tuba and harp, and renamed it "Idyll" -- a pastoral. The grief is still in the music. It premiered at the 1901 Gloucester Festival, conducted by Coleridge-Taylor himself.

FANTASIA ON A THEME FROM THAILAND
Richard Meyer
With the Youth String Play-In and NSquared Dance

Richard Meyer is an American composer of works for student string ensembles, widely performed in school orchestras across North America. The Fantasia is a set of variations
on the Pong Lang Dance, one of Thailand's most popular melodies. The pong lang itself is a wooden-keyed instrument similar to a xylophone, but suspended vertically on ropes
-- with the low notes at the top and the high notes at the bottom. The melody is built on a pentatonic scale and is simple by nature; the variations carry it through changing tempi and styles before the original returns, gradually gaining speed and energy as in a traditional performance of the dance.

VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MINOR, Op. 47
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) | composed 1903, revised 1905
  I. Allegro Moderato
Yeonjoo Melody Oh, soloist

Sibelius's only concerto. He wrote it as a violinist who had wanted to be a virtuoso himself, but had started too late. The first version premiered in 1904 to disastrous reviews; Sibelius withdrew it, revised every movement, and reissued it in 1905. Today it is among the most demanding works in the violin repertoire.

YEONJOO MELODY OH, SOLO VIOLIN

Yeonjoo Melody Oh began the violin in elementary school in Korea, where the instrument was part of a required school curriculum. She did not expect to pursue music seriously. After immigrating to the United States in fourth grade, she discovered school orchestras, chamber groups, and summer programs -- and music became something more than a school assignment. She began studying seriously in middle school.

In her own words: "Everyone is equal in front of music." She has come to feel deep empathy for Sibelius -- a composer who, like her, wanted to be a virtuoso but began too late. In her interpretation of his Violin Concerto, she channels what she calls the tension between his "heated passion" and "the iciness of both rejections and the tranquil coldness of a Finnish landscape." She has never been to Finland. Through deep study of the music, she has formed what she describes as a real friendship with the composer.

Yeonjoo is the 2026 winner of the Lowell Philharmonic Orchestra's Jeanne Salender Memorial Concerto Competition.