Clinton Symphony Orchestra will honor Beethoven’s 250th birthday anniversary – belatedly – with a concert Saturday evening November 6 at 7:30 in Centennial Auditorium at Sterling High School (face masks are required indoors in Illinois). The actual birthday anniversary was in 2020, when the orchestra was on hiatus due to the pandemic. The composer’s energetic Seventh Symphony and Third Piano Concerto are on the program.
Guest artist is pianist Marian Lee, presently a faculty member at St. Ambrose University in Davenport. 
Dr. Lee made her New York City debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall as winner of the Artists International Award and has appeared as soloist and with orchestra internationally in Austria, Belgium, Italy, France, Norway, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Poland, Brazil, Byelorussia, Estonia, Hong Kong, Thailand, as well as in Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center’s Millenium Stage, Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall and Rachmaninoff Hall, and the Hermitage Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Although the Seventh Symphony was composed during one of Beethoven’s most painful periods – worsening deafness, a collapsed love affair, and his need of money – Anthony Hopkins describes the work as the “feeling of true spontaneity. The notes seem to fly off the page as we are borne along on a floodtide of inspired invention.”
The Third Piano Concerto marks a breakthrough in Beethoven’s compositions, evolving from the style of his classical predecessors Mozart and Haydn to his own intense, dramatic, and inventive style. It also marks an important technological advancement in the piano itself, adding keys to stretch the piano’s range, which Beethoven used fully.
The 50 musicians of the orchestra are from a wide area of eastern Iowa and northwest Illinois, and under the direction of Brian Dollinger. This concert is the second of a six-concert series of the orchestra’s 68th concert season.
In cooperation with Community State Bank, the Symphony will provide a charter bus from Clinton, through Fulton and Morrison, to the concert in Sterling. Reservations are required, and may be made by calling 563-219-8084.
All students are admitted free to the concert, and each student is allowed to admit one adult to the concert for half-price. Regular adult admission is $20. Tickets are available at the door of the concert.