Urban Youth Orcherstra Summer Concert

The Urban Youth Orchestra of Orchestrating Diversity, St. Louis’ El Sistema music for social change program, emerges from the pandemic to present a concert on Sunday 7 August, 2022 at 4:00 pm.

The concert will feature the 18th century Black composer, Chevalier de Saint George. Saint George was a violin virtuoso living in France and a contemporary of Mozart. The orchestra will perform his 1st Symphony in G Major Op. 11. The concert continues with Aiden Maue (student at Afton High School) performing the Mozart Horn Concerto in D Major K. 412. Written in his final year and left without a third movement, it has become a standard in the repertoire.

The concert will conclude with a performance of Antonin Dvorak’s Suite in A Major (commonly known as the American Suite). Dvorak’s unheeded recommendation that American composers make use of African American and Native music as source material is the subject of a current best seller “Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music” by Joseph Horowitz. In this piece, Dvorak shows how this can be done.