The Venice Symphony presents a BOLD new season at the beautiful Venice Performing Arts Center. Join Maestro Troy Quinn and more than 70 professional musicians on January 11-12 for Strauss, Schumann and Mendlessohn, featuring guest soloist Andrew Tyson, hailed by the New York Times for “playing with passion and poetry.”

The Symphony named Quinn as Music Director in May 2018, so this season’s music was programmed by Leif Bjaland, artistic advisor to the Florida West Coast Symphony Orchestra and former artistic director of the Sarasota Orchestra. Putting his own touch on January’s concert, Quinn added Sir William Walton's rarely heard Suite from the film Henry V starring Laurence Olivier. Says Quinn, “This is rousing music that is guaranteed to lift you off your feet as the orchestra plays climactic battle scenes and heart wrenching melodies!”

Hailed by BBC Radio 3 as “a real poet of the piano,” Andrew Tyson is a recipient of a 2013 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Laureate of the 2013 Queen Elisabeth Competition and captured First Prize at the 2015 Géza Anda Competition, where he was also awarded the Mozart and Audience Prizes. This season Tyson is performing throughout the United States and in the Far East, including this past summer as a soloist in the Bernstein Symphony No. 2 at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. As winner of the 2011 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Mr. Tyson was awarded YCA’s Paul A. Fish Memorial and John Browning Memorial Prizes. In 2013, he gave his New York recital debut in the Young Concert Artists Series. A Laureate at the 2012 Leeds International Piano Competition, Andrew Tyson won the special Terence Judd-Hallé Orchestra Prize. He earned his Master’s degree and Artist Diploma at The Juilliard School with Robert McDonald, where he won the Gina Bachauer Piano Competition and received the Arthur Rubinstein Prize in Piano. Andrew Tyson’s has two solo recordings on the Alpha Classics label.

The concert is also your chance to hear Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March from A Midsummer’s Night Dream as it is meant to be heard, with a full orchestra. Fun fact: the piece became popular at weddings after Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Royal, selected it for her royal wedding. 

Richard Strauss’s masterwork Till Eulespiegel’s Merry Pranks rounds out this full-bodied concert.

Tickets available here.

BBC RADIO 3 (London, England):

“Tyson is a real poet of the piano. His playing is exquisite, flexible, subtle, colorful, passionate, and daring.”