Welcome to Springtime

Spring is in the air and the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra is paying tribute to the season with a performance at the Rialto theatre on Friday. Three works are part of this event.

In 1944 American composer Aaron Copland set about writing his Appalachian Spring ballet after being commissioned by choreographer and dancer Martha Graham. Awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year, the work has since achieved widespread popularity in the form of an orchestral suite.

In 1887 one of French composer Claude Debussy’s assignments as a Prix de Rome scholar at the Villa Medici was to send back to the Fine Arts Academy in France an orchestral score so his benefactors could judge his professional progress. All he managed to turn in however was a piano duet called Printemps. It was as late as 1913 that Debussy got around to presenting an orchestral version.

In 1841, Robert Schumann wrote his First Symphony, also known as Spring Symphony in a burst of creative energy over four days in January.

Welcome to Springtime
Live performance by the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra. May 18. Rialto Theatre, Limassol. 8.30pm. €5/7/12. Tel: 22-463144

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.