CONCERT #3 OF THE 2025-26 SEASON:
Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3
Ft. Beverly Fu
Sunday, May 17th, 2026 - 3:30 PM
Wayne State University
Community Arts Auditorium
450 Reuther Mall Detroit MI 48201
Approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes
Enjoy this concert in person at the details mentioned above, or online.
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Program
The Cowboys Overture - John Williams
Piano Concerto No. 3 - Beethoven
Grand Canyon Overture - Grofé
The Cowboys Overture - John Williams
John Williams (b.1932)
John Williams is one of the most celebrated composers of film music of all time. Born in Queens, New York, Williams moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1948. He began his studies at UCLA, but they were interrupted by military service. He served in the Air Force from 1951–1955 where he played piano, conducted, and arranged music for the Air Force Band. After his service, he moved back to New York City to study piano briefly at the Juilliard School, intending to become a concert pianist. However, realizing that he could not compete with leading pianists of the time, such as John Browning and Van Cliburn, he returned to Los Angeles and decided to focus on composing instead. By the early 1970s, he was already well-known in Hollywood, but his career would soon expand dramatically through landmark collaborations with directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. His scores for films including Star Wars, Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Schindler's List have become part of our cultural fabric, earning him multiple Academy Awards and dozens of nominations. Still active in his nineties, Williams continues to conduct and compose selectively. The Cowboys Overture is drawn from Williams’s score to the 1972 film The Cowboys, starring John Wayne. The story follows a rancher who, after his cowhands abandon him, recruits a group of schoolboys to help drive his cattle across the frontier to market. The drive produces challenges like weather, horse thieves, and death that force young men to grow up in a hurry. Williams distilled the score into this concert overture, capturing both the grandeur of the landscape and the emotional arc of the story. The piece begins with bold energy, transitions to a long Copland-esque middle section that evokes the wide-open spaces of the movie’s Montana setting and ends with a reprise of the opening material.
Piano Concerto No. 3 - Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Ludwig van Beethoven completed most of his Piano Concerto No. 3 around 1800 and premiered it in Vienna on April 5, 1803, with himself as soloist. The concert was ambitious even by Beethoven’s standards, also featuring his Symphony No. 2 and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. Rehearsals that day stretched from early morning until mid-afternoon, leaving musicians exhausted before the performance even began. At one point, Beethoven’s patron Prince Carl von Lichnowsky sent out for cold cuts and wine to stoke up the exhausted musicians, then asked them to run through Christ on the Mount of Olives “just one more time.”
Set in C minor, a key Beethoven often used for intensity and drama, the concerto opens with a tense orchestral introduction before the piano enters and takes an active, expressive role. The second movement offers a striking contrast, unfolding with a calm lyricism in the key of E major. Its final note, a G-sharp, is immediately reinterpreted as an A-flat as the pianist launches into the rondo finale, plunging the music back into the dark tonality of C minor. The middle section is in A-flat major, the first note now with its own key. In a playful twist, Beethoven turns the A-flat back into G-sharp, briefly returning to E major (the key of the 2nd movement) before the music gathers momentum, exiting a short cadenza in a high-spirited race to the finish line in C major.
Grand Canyon Overture - Grofé
Ferde Grofé (1892–1972)
Ferdinand “Ferde” Rudolph von Grofé was born in New York City into a musical family. After his father, a classical baritone singer, died in 1899, his mother, an accomplished cellist, took him to Leipzig, Germany to study at her alma mater. The family returned to Los Angeles in 1906, where Grofé’s grandfather was principal cellist and his uncle concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Grofé studied multiple instruments and, while he favored the piano, he was a skilled violist, performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for nearly a decade.
By 1920, Grofé started moving away from classical music and began playing jazz piano for the Paul Whiteman orchestra. He arranged for Paul Whiteman until 1932, orchestrating hundreds of popular songs for the ensemble. His most famous orchestration is that of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The Grand Canyon Suite (1931) became a factor in Grofé’s angry split from Whiteman. After Whiteman moved to Chicago in 1930, Grofe’s role as lead arranger was largely taken over by another musician, and he began to moonlight as an arranger for radio and for other bands. The Grand Canyon Suite was a tremendous success when Whiteman introduced it in the fall of 1931, so much so, that it became Grofé’s ticket out of the band. He began to conduct performances of the piece that did not involve Whiteman; the last straw was when he arranged for a concert in New York that competed directly with a Whiteman show. They did not speak for years afterwards, and even though the two later reunited professionally, their relationship was never fully repaired.
The Grand Canyon Suite is Grofé’s musical portrait of the American landscape, tracing the arc of a day at the Grand Canyon in five movements. “Sunrise” depicts dawn breaking over the desert, as light gradually reveals the canyon’s vastness. “The Painted Desert” evokes a quiet, expansive landscape filled with shifting color. “On the Trail” follows a traveler and his donkey descending into the canyon, complete with hoofbeats, a distant waterfall, and even the sound of a music box. “Sunset” brings a sense of stillness as darkness settles over the landscape. The suite concludes with “Cloudburst”, a dramatic storm scene featuring lightning, thunder, and driving rain before the sky clears once more.
Featured Artist
Beverly Fu
Beverly Fu began playing the piano and violin at the age of five, and she quickly favored the former. She competed on the piano through high school, winning titles at the local, regional, and state levels under the tutelage of Drs. Haicong Ni, Wei-Qin Claire Tang, and Derek Polischuk. Beverly graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Microbiology and a minor in Music, studying with Drs. Arthur Greene and Matthew Bengtson. After working in Baltimore, MD for a couple of years, she moved back to Michigan in 2023 to begin medical school and—at the insistence of her then-neighbor and former DMO concertmaster Victoria Qian—picked the violin back up to join the Detroit Medical Orchestra. For the past two years, she has served on the orchestra’s Board of Directors as Co-Coordinator for Student Outreach. Beverly is currently a first year PhD student in the MD/PhD program at Wayne State University School of Medicine, where she studies the innate immune system of the female reproductive tract.
