UTC Symphony Orchestra to perform fall concert on November 6

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra will present a free concert, open to the public, at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 6, in the UTC Fine Arts Center’s Roland Hayes Concert Hall.

The fall concert will also be available to watch via livestream.

The 60-member college/community orchestra, led by UTC Symphony Orchestra conductor Sandy Morris, includes University music majors and non-majors, UTC music faculty members, area music educators and other amateur and professional musicians from the region.

The concert will feature Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastorale,” written as a celebration of life in the country as Beethoven came to terms with his deafness.

Also on the program is Dr. Kenyon Wilson’s “Songs of Distant Earth.” Wilson, a former Fulbright Scholar to Azerbaijan, is a professor and interim head of the UTC Department of Performing Arts.

“I’m delighted for the UTC Symphony Orchestra to perform these two works during this concert,” Morris said. “Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 is his exaltation of nature and its power to inspire, and our seniors need to experience the performance of a Beethoven symphony.

“‘Songs of Distant Earth’ by our department head, Dr. Kenyon Wilson, is a stylistically diverse and sometimes humorous suite inspired by the dwarf planets in our solar system.”

Wilson, the winner of the 2014 Heartland Symphony Orchestra Composition Contest and the 2013 Hillcrest Wind Ensemble Composition Contest, has received commissions from the University of North Dakota, Hokusho University in Japan, Morehead State University, Tennessee Technological University, Charlotte Tuba Ensemble, International Music Camp in North Dakota and the International Tuba/Euphonium Association.

His recent work, “Five,” written in response to the July 2015 terrorist attack in Chattanooga, was the winner of the 2016 Carolyn Thompson and Roger Brown Community Engagement Award and a finalist for the American Prize in Composition.

Location: The UTC Fine Arts Center is at 752 Vine St. and the intersection with Palmetto.