Andrew Grams helps Elgin Symphony kick off 65th season

Music director Andrew Grams will lift his baton to open the Elgin Symphony Orchestra's 65th season this weekend at the Hemmens Cultural Center, with Grammy Award-winning American cellist Lynn Harrell playing music by Tchaikovsky in concerts that will also include Johannes Brahms' iconic First Symphony.

This is Grams' third season as music director, and he plans to be around for several years to come after agreeing to a five-year contract extension this summer. He will be in Elgin for seven of the ESO's subscription programs in 2015-16.

“I am really looking forward to continue working with these wonderful musicians,” Grams said. “I've already started to plan programming and repertoire in a much longer time frame.”

Harrell, who has appeared with most of the world's leading orchestras in a career spanning four decades, will play Tchaikovsky's showstopping “Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra,” along with the composer's own string orchestra-cello arrangement of the “Andante Cantabile” movement from his String Quartet No. 1 in D Major.

“When Lynn and I first worked together several years ago with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, we had a wonderful time,” Grams said. “And he said ‘When you get your first music directorship, I would love to come and play with your orchestra.' I told him, ‘I'm going to hold you to that,' and he held up his end of the bargain. He's had a wonderful career as a soloist, in chamber music, and he's a wonderful teacher.”

Following intermission, Grams will conduct one of the best-loved works in the romantic orchestral repertoire, the Brahms First Symphony.

“Brahms struggled in writing this symphony,” Grams said. “It took him many years. But he was following Beethoven, and it's tough to follow that great man and his Ninth Symphony.”

The concert will open with the “Variations on America” by Charles Ives, which fits in with the ESO's season-long theme, “American Connections,” each concert program including music by an American composer. Prominent among them is Leonard Bernstein, whose Symphony No. 1 (“Jeremiah”) will be paired with Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4 in the season finale the weekend of April 30-May 1. Other featured American composers will include Aaron Copland, John Adams and Ives, whose Second Symphony will be heard in March as a follow-up to this weekend's season-opening “Variations on America.”

Grams will again offer his Musically Speaking with the Maestro audience chats in the main theater one hour prior to each concert, free to all ticketholders. His next concerts with the ESO will be a Halloween-themed program on Oct. 31-Nov. 1, which will include Modest Mussorgsky's “A Night on Bald Mountain” and Camille Saint-Saëns' “Danse Macabre.”