Skwortsow will perform Bruch's "Scottish Fantasie for Violin with Orchestra and Harp." The Knox-Galesburg Symphony, conducted by music director Bruce Polay, will also perform Beethoven's Symphony No. 8.

Concert ticket prices start as low as $8.00. Children and students receive 50% discounts. For ticket information, visit the Orpheum Theatre Office, 60 S. Kellogg St., Galesburg or call (309) 342-2299.

Other Activities:

Friday, March 26, 12 noon -- Bruce Polay, Symphony conductor, will host the KGS "Brown Bag" concert preview in the Kensington Garden Room. The public is invited to bring their lunch or just come and listen to a FREE informal preview of Saturday's concert music and composers. A $5.00 light lunch will be available.

Friday, March 26, 7:30 p.m., Skwortsow and Polay will give a recital at the Monmouth College Auditorium as part of the Maple Leaf Community Concert Series.

Saturday, March 27, 10:00 a.m. -- Polay will host the "Russian Music" Music Mornings program at the Galesburg Public Library. Music Mornings, co-sponsored by the Knox-Galesburg Symphony and the Galesburg Public Library in cooperation with Galesburg School District 205, is a free concert preview for children ages preschool through 5th grade.

About the guest artist:

A member of the prestigious Royal Concertgebouw, Skwortsow has performed to rave reviews throughout Europe and Canada. He has played guest performances with orchestra, recitals and chamber music in Canada, Germany, Holland, Russia and various other western European countries. He was described as an "irresistible virtuoso" by one West German critic.

Now a Dutch citizen, Skwortsow previously served as concertmaster of the Vancouver Symphony (Canada) and co-concertmaster of the legendary Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. He has been a member of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Lubeck Symphony orchestras since leaving Russia.

Playing violin since age eight, he made his solo debut at the age of sixteen with the Novosibirsk Symphony Orchestra. His education includes master classes at the Leningrad Conservatory of Music (1966-1971) and studies with Boris Sergeev in traditional and academic repertoire, virtuosi violin literature with Boris Goldstein in Moscow and at the Special School for Musically gifted children in Novosibirsk, Russia. He twice won prizes in the USSR's National Youth Music Competition.

About the Program:

Max Bruch (1838-1920) composed his Scottish Fantasie in 1880. While harmonically conventional for its time, the Scottish Fantasie is a true product of the Romantic thinking that identified form with Nature. For the Romanticist, Nature was a collection of often unrelated parts which, when interwoven, made sense. So goes Bruch's Scottish Fantasie which contains several contrasting movements which are sometimes connected by transitions and sometimes set apart by time.

Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827) began Symphony No. 8 in 1811. Its dynamic range and orchestration reflect backwards with great regard for the refined and elegant "style galant." The first movement is somewhat typical in its sonata design, the meter structure is in three (an oddity for firs movements of the period). The second movement is fashioned around a repeating eight note pattern that, in the hands of Beethoven's genius, turns the mundane into the spectacular. The third movement is particularly novel for Beethoven in that it is a minuet. The last movement is the most subtly adventuresome of the four. It is full of formal surprise, violent harmonic twists that must have seemed outrageous in Beethoven's day yet still sound fresh today. Formally, the movement shares the characteristics of both sonata and rondo forms.