Last night we played our last concert in the concert hall until next September. It was a program to thank our many donors who have given of their time and money to help support the symphony. They deserved a hearty thank you from all of us on stage, and I think that our performance gave that to them in spades. The conductor for the evening was Resident Conductor Gregory Vajda.
Conductor Gregory Vajda
The concert opened with Berlioz’s seldom-heard Overture to Beatrice and Benedict. It’s a piece that I’ve never performed before, and not even heard before I downloaded a recording from iTunes the night before our first rehearsal. It’s a delightful piece, full of all the usual Berlioz idiosyncrasies, like off-kilter rhythms, thundering brass, scurrying strings, and soaring melodic lines with quirky rhythmic underpinnings.
Next was our new principal trumpet Jeffrey Work, who played a concerto written expressly for him by friend, fellow trumpeter, and composer James Stephenson. It’s a lovely work, with virtuoso demands on the soloist, which Jeff met with nary a stumble, and gorgeous tone and control evident at all times. It is a piece which places no overt demands on the audience, it sounds great and is easy on the ears, all the while giving new heights of acrobatic daring-do to the trumpet soloist. I polled some colleagues in the orchestra, and they heard echoes of Barber and Walton floating around in the zeitgeist of the piece, which gives you an idea of the harmonic language of the piece.
Last was the venerable war horse, the Second Symphony of Jean Sibelius. We’ve done this piece a lot in the past, including recording it with James DePreist a few years ago. It took a lot of coaxing for Gregory Vajda to get us out of our traditional tempi and copious applications of rallentandi, but it resulted in a less bloated and more lean version of a piece that many of us wouldn’t mind not playing for a while.
If anything stood out about this concert, aside from our general thankfulness that we have so many generous patrons and volunteers, is was how very tired were all were. The concerts of the previous week took a lot out of all of us, and like a horse who has done a long day’s plowing, we could smell the hay and see the barn in the distance, and we were ready to hang up our instruments for the summer!