Table of Contents
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: March 11, 2010
By: John
Fleming
Marvin Hamlisch to appear with Florida
Orchestra
Marvin Hamlisch is a musical jack of all trades, composing for stage, film and television. He's responsible for some monster hits, such The Way We Were for Barbra Streisand and the score for The Sting, which won an Oscar and sparked a revival of interest in ragtime and the music of Scott Joplin. And then there's A Chorus Line, for which he won a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1976. I enjoy the Hamlisch hits as much as anyone, but my favorites from his catalog run to the more obscure. Here are five of them.
1. Smile is the great lost Hamlisch musical from 1986, adapted from the movie about a beauty pageant in small-town California. A song cut from the show that always makes me laugh is Nightlife in Santa Rosa, with incomparably witty lyrics by Carolyn Leigh.
2. What I Did for Love is the showstopper from A Chorus Line, but it's actually the lamest song in the score. For my money, from a standpoint of musical craftsmanship, the best song is At the Ballet.
3. The Swimmer. Hamlisch has composed more than 40 film scores, but I have an enduring fondness for the soundtrack from his first, The Swimmer (1968). The movie is a dark allegory adapted from a John Cheever short story in which Burt Lancaster is an advertising man at the end of his rope who does the crawl across suburban Connecticut from one swimming pool to another.
4. Sweet Smell of Success was a flop on Broadway in 2002, but the jazzy score by Hamlisch and lyricist Craig Carnelia is worth a listen.
5. Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows, the bubblegum single Hamlisch wrote for Lesley Gore. Check out the video on YouTube of Lesley singing this on a bus from the 1965 movie Ski Party.
Hamlisch, 65, will conduct, play piano and tell stories with the Florida
Orchestra at 8 p.m. Saturday at Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg, and 7:30 p.m.
Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater. He'll be joined by Broadway vocalist
Stephen Lehew. $20-$67. (727) 892-3337 or toll-free 1-800-662-7286;
floridaorchestra.org.
Source: The Tampa
Tribune
Published: March 8, 2010
By:
Kathy Greenberg
Stage, screen legend to lead Orchestra in weekend
concerts
Except for Richard Rodgers, Marvin Hamlisch is the only American composer to have won major awards in every genre of the entertainment industry. He has collected Grammys, Emmys, Golden Globes, Oscars, a Tony and a Pulitzer. From "The Sting" to "A Chorus Line" to "Barbra Streisand: The Concert," Hamlisch has enhanced the stage and screen for nearly half a century. And with all that pressure and fame, he's still got a sense of humor.
"I got a phone call from the secretary for Frank Sinatra," Hamlisch recalled. "She tells me he wants to speak to me. I'm in shock. He wants me to do an arrangement for him that he was going to be doing with Liza Minnelli. We all took a picture on New Year's Eve, except I was in a suit and tie and he was in zip-up jacket that in red letters said 'Frank.' Liza was in rehearsal clothes. When I got the picture back, it was unsigned, so I asked his secretary if I could send it back for him to sign. He signed it and wrote, 'Guess who's the lawyer?'"
With his consummate wit and verve, Hamlisch will return to The Florida Orchestra this weekend to perform music he wrote for such movies as "Sophie's Choice," "Ice Castles" and "The Way We Were." He's including a salute to Jerome Kern, plus pieces written by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers. He will also treat patrons to his version of "Rent-a-Composer," in which he makes up songs on the spot from titles suggested by audience members.
Hamlisch's musical prowess revealed itself in early childhood. At the age of 6, he was accepted to Juilliard. In 1968, he began composing for Hollywood films, his latest being "The Informant!"— a 2010 Oscar contender starring Matt Damon. Among his extensive body of work, the composer said he doesn't have personal favorites. But if pushed to choose an experience, he would cite "A Chorus Line" because it was the kind of "music I love doing — writing for Broadway."
His creative process is simple and joyful.
"You try to capture what you're thinking about in music. You're thinking about it in English terms but somehow trying to translate that into music. I enjoy performing, but there's something lovely about writing," Hamlisch said.
And much to his continued surprise, his immense career has kept him in company with some of the world's other great talents.
"When you start, you're hoping that you'll be able to work at what you like
doing," Hamlisch said. "All this other stuff was extra on the cake. Sometimes I
have to pinch myself because I've worked with so many great stars."
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: March 6, 2010
By: John
Fleming
Gershwin gimmick slips; his interesting 1925 piano roll
is no match for live performance
TAMPA — Is George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue the greatest piece of American classical music? Could be. It also could be the most overplayed piece of American classical music, but the Florida Orchestra came up with a twist on the old standby to wind up its concert Friday in Ferguson Hall of the Straz Center for the Performing Arts.
The soloist was Gershwin himself, or at least a 1925 piano roll of him transferred to software for a Yamaha Concert Grand Disklavier, a high-tech player piano. This was a gimmick, of course, but there was some musical interest to be found in Gershwin's style. He was quicker and rhythmically more forceful than is typically heard today.
Stefan Sanderling wore headphones to hear the original solo and jazz arrangement by Ferde Grofe, allowing the conductor to coordinate the ensemble between piano roll and orchestra. Still, the performance was ragged, and most of the time the piano was playing away alone, a weird, rather boring experience to watch the keys and pedals move by themselves. I'd rather watch and hear a real live soloist.
Sanderling and orchestra were more engaged by the other American work on the program, the Ives Third Symphony (The Camp Meeting), one of the composer's less craggy creations, quoting hymns like What a Friend We Have a Jesus. He composed the symphony in 1901-04, but it didn't get a full performance until 1946, amazing neglect of such accomplished music.
To open Friday's concert, Sanderling dipped a toe into the Second Viennese School, with Webern's Op. 1 Passacaglia, which has an easy elegance that belies the composer's membership in the 12-tone triumvirate along with his mentor Schoenberg and Berg. Classical Vienna was represented by Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, which featured haunting solo oboe played by Katherine Young.
• The orchestra has designated March as fundraising month — a la NPR's pledge
drives — but instead of having a pre-concert pitch by a board member or manager,
it is showing a promotional video. Produced gratis by Bay News 9, it will run
before each concert this month.
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: March 4, 2010
By: John
Fleming
Technology lets Florida Orchestra feature performance by
George Gershwin
Numerous pianists have been the soloist for Rhapsody in Blue with
the Florida Orchestra — Michael Kim, Jeffrey Siegel and Norman Krieger in the
past 15 years or so. Now the orchestra will get a chance this weekend to play
the iconic work with the man who composed it and was the soloist in the 1924
premiere, George Gershwin.
Well, if not Gershwin himself — he died in 1937 — then a close approximation of his performance, thanks to technology.
"This is an opportunity for George Gershwin to make a rare posthumous appearance,'' says George Litterst, the music technologist behind the production.
Instead of playing with a real live pianist this weekend, music director Stefan Sanderling and the orchestra will be joined onstage by a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano, which is essentially a high-tech player piano. The solo piano part will be played by a MIDI file produced from a piano roll made by Gershwin in 1925.
"It's a very expressive performance,'' says Litterst, who used sophisticated musical software to transfer Rhapsody in Blue from piano roll to Disklavier for the first time for the Boston Pops in 1998, the centennial of Gershwin's birth. "You'll hear loud and soft, properly pedaled, just as Gershwin played it.''
When Gershwin was growing up, the parlor of many a household had a player piano and a box of paper piano rolls punched full of holes. He was inspired to become a musician after hearing a piano roll of Anton Rubinstein playing one of his compositions. As a Tin Pan Alley pianist, Gershwin made more than 100 piano rolls of popular songs, including some from the musicals he created with his brother, Ira.
"The heyday of the player piano was around 1923,'' says Litterst, 56, a pianist, educator and music technology consultant in Massachusetts. "At that time, over half of the pianos sold in the United States had some kind of player system.''
The piano roll of Rhapsody in Blue was an arrangement of the solo and the jazz-band instrumentation as performed by Gershwin and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in the premiere. In Gershwin's hands, the solo sounds quite different from recordings by the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Andre Previn, Earl Wild and others.
"It is a lot faster, and in the passages where Gershwin is playing by himself, you will hear a very distinctive treatment of the rhythms quite unlike what you've heard on a recording before,'' Litterst says.
Rhapsody in Blue and other Gershwin pieces have been slowed down by generations of classical pianists. "The influence of the classical pianist has been to overromanticize a lot of Gershwin,'' Litterst says. "I can remember listening for the first time to Gershwin's own recorded performance of his Three Preludes, and being very startled by how he interpreted the first one, which so many pianists will play in this hazy, romantic way. His is a very fast-moving, straight-ahead performance.''
Litterst planned to attend orchestra rehearsals this week to help set up the Disklavier and familiarize Sanderling with it. The conductor will wear headphones to listen to the original piano roll — both solo and orchestration — so as to be able to coordinate some of the tricky tempo changes in Gershwin's performance with the live orchestra. The work opens with the famous clarinet glissando before the piano makes its entrance.
"The conductor will freely conduct the first 18 measures, and as he
gives the upbeat to measure 19, he will push the play button on this box,''
Litterst says. "From that point onwards, a MIDI file of the piano will play
continuously, with the conductor listening to the original piano roll
performance on his headphones. It is a different kind of experience for a
symphony orchestra conductor.''
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: February 18, 2010
By:
John Fleming
Ellis Hall joins Florida Orchestra for tribute to Ray
Charles
Ellis Hall seems to have been destined to pay tribute to Ray Charles. Like Charles, Hall is blind. Both men were born in Georgia, and both became singers. The two met and were friends for several years before the legendary Brother Ray died in 2004.
"It was really funny," Hall told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "He came in when I was playing I Can See Clearly Now, literally during my solo. I had the band groove on while I went down to say hello. He stayed for the whole show and called me the next day."
This weekend, Hall will be performing Hit the Road Jack, I Can't Stop Loving You, Georgia on My Mind and other Charles standards with the Florida Orchestra. The program will be conducted by Matt Catingub, who has some impressive pops and jazz chops himself, having worked with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Bellson and Jack Jones.
Although Hall has performed his Charles show with orchestras from the Kennedy Center to the Hollywood Bowl, he also is known for having been the lead singer with Tower of Power and one of the vocalists for the animated California Raisins in TV commercials. In movies, he played organ and sang gospel in Big Momma's House, was the voice of a singing rooster in Chicken Run and performed in Catch Me If You Can. He has released three albums of his own.
Hall and the orchestra play at 8 p.m. Friday at Ferguson Hall of the
David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts, Tampa; 8 p.m. Saturday at
Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg; and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall,
Clearwater. $20-$67; $10 for students. (727) 892-3337 or toll-free
1-800-662-7286; floridaorchestra.org.
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: February 27, 2010
By:
John Fleming
Cellist Julie Albers is appealingly bold in performance
with Florida Orchestra
TAMPA — It's great to catch a young musician on the rise, and
cellist Julie Albers is one to watch. Her assured performance as the soloist in
Haydn's Cello Concerto in C was the highlight of Friday's Florida Orchestra
concert, conducted by Stefan Sanderling in Ferguson Hall of the Straz Center for
the Performing Arts.
Of course the crowd pleaser of the night was Bolero, which wound up the program, but that's kind of a given. Ravel's relentless showpiece always brings down the house.
There are two Haydn cello concertos, and Albers played the first, composed between 1761 and 1765. As a model of classical refinement, it's not a flashy work, but she captured the composer's typically cheerful mood with elan, while also putting her own stamp on it with a sweet, singing tone and crisp articulation.
Not unlike an Olympic athlete, a concert soloist needs to be a daredevil, throwing caution to the wind but never losing her poise, and Albers displayed that sort of quality in the concerto. When she dropped down briefly into the cello's lower register in the second movement's cadenza, it was a spine-tingling moment.
Sanderling and the orchestra gave a brilliant account of the first two movements of Mozart's Symphony No. 38 (Prague). These are two of the most intensely concentrated movements in the repertoire, and the violins, urged on by concertmaster Jeffrey Multer, were especially splendid. Only in the third and final movement (the symphony lacks the traditional minuet movement, supposedly because Prague had a prejudice against dancing in 1787) did the orchestra falter when someone flubbed an entrance and broke the spell.
Friday's program opened with a sprightly performance of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Dukas tone poem that will forever be thought of as cartoon music because of its use in Mickey Mouse's star turn with a broom in Fantasia.
Bolero started out with the soft, insistent snare drum of John Shaw,
positioned right behind the violas, and he was eventually joined by sultry
flute, clarinet, sax, trombone and others, over gentle pizzicato in the strings.
After 15 minutes of the longest crescendo in music, the orchestra reached the
frenzied climax that drove Bo Derek and Dudley Moore wild in 10.
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: February 18, 2010
By:
John Fleming
Ellis Hall joins Florida Orchestra for tribute to Ray
Charles
Ellis Hall seems to have been destined to pay tribute to Ray Charles. Like Charles, Hall is blind. Both men were born in Georgia, and both became singers. The two met and were friends for several years before the legendary Brother Ray died in 2004.
"It was really funny," Hall told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "He came in when I was playing I Can See Clearly Now, literally during my solo. I had the band groove on while I went down to say hello. He stayed for the whole show and called me the next day."
This weekend, Hall will be performing Hit the Road Jack, I Can't Stop Loving You, Georgia on My Mind and other Charles standards with the Florida Orchestra. The program will be conducted by Matt Catingub, who has some impressive pops and jazz chops himself, having worked with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Bellson and Jack Jones.
Although Hall has performed his Charles show with orchestras from the Kennedy Center to the Hollywood Bowl, he also is known for having been the lead singer with Tower of Power and one of the vocalists for the animated California Raisins in TV commercials. In movies, he played organ and sang gospel in Big Momma's House, was the voice of a singing rooster in Chicken Run and performed in Catch Me If You Can. He has released three albums of his own.
Hall and the orchestra play at 8 p.m. Friday at Ferguson Hall of the
David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts, Tampa; 8 p.m. Saturday at
Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg; and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall,
Clearwater. $20-$67; $10 for students. (727) 892-3337 or toll-free
1-800-662-7286; floridaorchestra.org.
Source: The Tampa
Tribune
Published: February 15, 2010
By:
Kathy L. Greenberg
Ray Charles protege at center of weekend tribute concert
Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Ellis Hall has enjoyed an amazing career while hovering just beneath the public radar. In the entertainment industry, however, he's racked up decades' worth of credits and kudos. For the record, he's the man behind the voice on soundtracks for "The Wonder Years," "NYPD Blue," "Chicken Run," "Big Momma's House" and "Polar Express." A quick eye will spot him playing piano in the film "Catch Me If You Can." His California Raisins albums went gold and platinum.
Despite Hall's solid foothold in the music industry, R&B artist Ray Charles had never heard of him. By chance, they met at a party where Hall was performing for friends. Charles called him the next day to get better acquainted, and in 2003 the legendary artist signed him to his record company, Crossover Records.
"Ray called me his protégé. He felt like he had discovered me. He said he wanted to get me out to the world," Hall said in a telephone interview.
Charles died in 2004, leaving legions of fans and peers to keep his music alive, whether playing one of his CDs or holding a tribute concert. Case in point, this month Hall will honor the memory of his friend and late-life mentor with The Florida Orchestra in "A Tribute to Ray Charles." He'll perform classic hits such as "Georgia on My Mind," "Hit the Road Jack," "What'd I Say" and "I Can't Stop Loving You."
"I'm going to tell little stories about Ray. I'm going to talk behind the music. I get to carry on the legacy without the cantankery," said Hall, laughing.
The artists may have had different dispositions, but they harmonized in every other way: Both were Georgia-born African Americans. Both were visually impaired at a young age (Hall was born with congenital glaucoma). And both found music to be their means of expression and creativity.
"Once we came together musically, we realized how close we were. Stevie [Wonder] and I have that kindred spirit, too. Ray had sight and I had sight; we talked about that. That commonality and … music being the universal language — when you find it, whether you're blind or not, there's immediate camaraderie," Hall said.
CONCERT PREVIEW
'A Tribute to Ray Charles'
WHAT: Ellis Hall with conductor Matt Catingub
WHEN AND WHERE: 8 p.m. Friday at Ferguson Hall, David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts, 1010 N. MacInnes Place, Tampa ; 8 p.m. Saturday at Mahaffey Theater, 400 First St. S., St. Petersburg; 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, 1111 McMullen-Booth Road, Clearwater
TICKETS: $20 to $67; call (727) 892-3337 or 1-800-662-7286, or visit www.floridaorchestra.org
More in February with The Florida Orchestra
Bravura Brunch: Matt Catingub, Steve Moretti and Perry Orfanella perform at a lunch and silent auction sponsored by North Suncoast Associates. Proceeds go to The Florida Orchestra; 11 a.m. Saturday, Stirling Hall, Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club, U.S. 19 N., Palm Harbor; $60
Ravel's "Bolero": Many may recall Ravel's bold sound
from the movie "10," as well as Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." This was
Mickey Mouse's theme music in the 1940 film "Fantasia." Cellist Julie Albers
also performs selections by Mozart and Haydn; 8 p.m. Feb. 26 at Ferguson Hall,
Straz Center, Tampa; 8 p.m. Feb. 27 at Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg; 7:30
p.m. Feb. 28 at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater; $20-$67.
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: February 14, 2010
By:
John Fleming
Florida Orchestra's Stefan Sanderling shapes the new season seeking musical balance
Every year about this time, Florida Orchestra music director Stefan Sanderling offers his version of a balanced budget — a musical budget, that is, as he announces the programming for next season.
"There are programs to enjoy, and there are programs that can be a life-changing experience,'' Sanderling said. "I don't think a Tchaikovsky program is a life-changing experience; it's not meant to be. But I think the Shostakovich 15th Symphony is a life-changing experience. And it's all about finding a balance between those two things.''
For 2010-11, the results of Sanderling's balancing act include both Shostakovich's final, death-haunted symphony and an all-Tchaikovsky program. There are also a healthy batch of contemporary works such as John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony and plenty of traditional favorites such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, plus the return of Thomas Wilkins, the popular former resident conductor of the orchestra.
Today the orchestra releases its programming for next season's masterworks and coffee concert series, which is being expanded beyond its longtime home at Mahaffey Theater to include several concerts at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Programming for the pops series will be released later.
The season opens Oct. 8-10 with Wilkins as guest conductor. Since his tenure with the orchestra from 1994 through 2002, he has gone on to fashion a fine career and is now music director of the Omaha Symphony and principal guest conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. Wilkins' program includes James Beckel's Toccata, Respighi's Pines of Rome and Liszt's Les Preludes, which he conducted the last time he was in front of the orchestra in 2003.
Sanderling, artistic administrator David Rogers and other staff members work on the programming and booking of soloists and guest conductors in a process that is complicated by the orchestra's unusual arrangement of playing in four venues: Mahaffey in St. Petersburg, Ruth Eckerd in Clearwater and Morsani and Ferguson halls in the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa. Because these venues have their own programming to book, the orchestra must do a daunting juggling act to match guest artists and repertoire with dates. A major problem is that uncertainty over dates forces the orchestra to engage guest artists later than most U.S. orchestras.
Soloists next season include four who have previously performed with the orchestra: pianists Peter Rosel in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, Lilya Zilberstein in Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto and Stewart Goodyear in Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, and cellist Mark Kosower in the Dvorak Cello Concerto.
Three members of the orchestra will be featured: concertmaster Jeffrey Multer in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, principal second violin Sarah Shellman in British composer Thomas Ades' Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths) and principal bassoon Anthony Georgeson in the Mozart Bassoon Concerto.
Sanderling labored on the program the orchestra will play in January to celebrate the opening of the Salvador Dali Museum, across the lawn from the Mahaffey. "It was probably the program that took the longest to put together,'' he said. "The problem with Dali is that his relationship to music was very limited. To find something that reflects and describes Dali's art was not easy. It took us about three months to come up with that.''
Suitably surreal works on the program include HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! A Pandemonium for Chansonnier & Ensemble, Milhaud's Le Boeuf Sur le Toit (The Ox on the Roof) and Debussy's orchestrations of Satie's Gymnopedie Nos. 1 and 2. There are also less madcap works such as Beethoven's Consecration of the House and a suite from Spanish composer de Falla's ballet score The Three-Cornered Hat.
In a significant move for the orchestra, the coffee series will have three concerts next season at Ruth Eckerd, in addition to the seven at Mahaffey. All the programs will be conducted by Alastair Willis, with three of them played at both halls. Concerts at Ruth Eckerd will start an hour earlier, at 10 a.m.
"We know that Ruth Eckerd Hall has a strong adults at leisure series'' of daytime performances, said Michael Pastreich, the orchestra president. "The population base up there would overlap well with our coffee concert series. We expect that it ought to take off fairly strongly from the very first year.''
The expansion of the coffee series is part of a trend. "Across the board, subscribership is going down for all live activities — sports, symphony, opera,'' Pastreich said. "An exception to that rule is weekday matinees. Weekday matinees are increasing across the country. So it is clearly part of our agenda to move concerts into weekday time slots.''
Pastreich thinks baby boomers are driving the trend. "The largest
generation in history is reaching an age where weekday matinees are looking
better,'' he said.
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: February 14, 2010
By:
John Fleming
Chamber music series starting at Palladium in St. Petersburg
Brian Moorhead and Michael Strauss don't play together all that often. Moorhead is principal clarinet with the Florida Orchestra. Strauss is principal viola with the Indianapolis Symphony. Both musicians, however, are in the orchestra of the Crested Butte Music Festival in Colorado, and they hit it off when they played chamber music together there last summer.
"As soon as we started playing, we just smiled at each other and enjoyed how the piece unfolded,'' Moorhead said. "It was such a compatible feeling. We just knew at that first moment that we had to play together again. That was the seed of interest.''
Moorhead and Strauss were playing Schumann's Fairy Tales when they had their little epiphany in Colorado, and they'll play it again Tuesday in the first concert of this year's Encore chamber series, celebrating its 10th anniversary season at the Palladium Theater in St. Petersburg.
As a symphony orchestra musician, Moorhead puts a premium on the opportunity to play chamber music. "These collaborations keep us vibrant and alive and honest and in touch with our instruments more intimately,'' he said. "We have a chance to really give of ourselves and have an even stronger sense of fulfillment when we can reach the audience through the chamber music format.''
Clarinet and viola are fairly uncommon partners — Moorhead calls them "chameleons'' of the orchestra — and this week's concert, with pianist Brent Douglas, will also include Mozart's "Kegelstatt'' trio and selections from Bruch's Op. 83 pieces for clarinet, viola and piano. In addition, Moorhead will play three pieces for solo clarinet by Stravinsky, and Strauss will play Chahagir for solo viola by Hovhaness. The program will also be performed Monday night in Tampa at the University of South Florida.
Mark Sforzini is the artistic director of the Encore series, and he is featured as a composer in the March 16 concert, which will include the premiere of his work based on the 19th century paintings Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole. Sforzini, former principal bassoon with the Florida Orchestra, will play in the March 30 concert. He is also artistic director of the St. Petersburg Opera, which stages most of its productions at the Palladium.
Musicians in the four Encore concerts include members of the Florida Orchestra and Sarasota Orchestra. The Degas Quartet will play string quartets of Puccini (Crisantemi) and Haydn as well as Schumann's Op. 44 quintet, with pianist Grigorios Zamparas, on Feb. 23. Pianist Pascal Roge and violinist Amy Schwartz Moretti, former concertmaster of the Florida Orchestra, are featured in the March 16 concert, which includes Faure's Op. 13 sonata for violin and piano.
Encore Chamber Series
Feb 16: Michael Strauss, viola; Brian Moorhead, clarinet; Brent Douglas, piano. Works of Schumann, Mozart, Stravinsky, Hovhaness, Bruch.
Feb. 23: Degas Quartet with Grigorios Zamparas, piano. Works of Haydn, Puccini, Schumann.
March 16: Pascal Roge, piano; Amy Schwartz Moretti, violin; Isabelle Besancon, cello; Clay Ellerbroek, flute. Works of Faure, Sforzini, Brahms.
March 30: Jonathan Spivey, piano; Rosey Yiameos, oboe; Bharat Chandra, clarinet; Mark Sforzini, bassoon; Andrew Karr, horn; Rimas Karnavicius, bass voice. Works of Handel, J.S. Bach, Taranto, Poulenc, Beethoven.
All concerts are at 7:30 p.m. at the Palladium Theater, 253 Fifth Ave. N, St. Petersburg. $20 per concert or $60 for a season subscription. (727) 822-3590; mypalladium.org.
Moorhead, Strauss and Douglas also will perform their Encore program
at 8 p.m. Monday at the Music Recital Hall/FAH 101 at the University of South
Florida, Tampa. $8-$12. (813) 974-2323; music.arts.usf.edu.
Click
here to listen to Strauss, Moorhead, and Douglas' performance on 89.7
WUSF.
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: February 13, 2010
By:
John Fleming
Rediscovering two old friends
TAMPA — Sibelius was enchanted by swans. Once he saw 16 swans flying over his house in Finland ("My greatest experience!" he wrote in his diary), and they inspired some of his most memorable music.
Two of Sibelius' swan hymns were a big part of the Florida Orchestra's concert Friday night in Ferguson Hall of the Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Stefan Sanderling conducting. First, English horn player Jeffrey Stephenson performed the darkly narcotic solo that weaves in and out of The Swan of Tuonela, representing the swan that swims in the river of death in Finnish mythology. Stephenson, playing while standing in the woodwind section, was superb.
Sibelius' most famous swan-inspired music is the French horn theme that opens his Symphony No. 5, the centerpiece of the first half of the program. The horn theme is one of the many musical fragments that go into the mosaic of this most subtle, compressed of symphonies, which reaches its peak in the finale's interplay between a glorious melody by woodwind choir and quick, muted strings. The symphony closes with six crashing chords that I have always found unconvincing, but Sanderling brought the ending off as well as possible.
In the 1930s and '40s, Sibelius was played as frequently as Beethoven by American orchestras, but the Finn's music has been somewhat eclipsed lately. Now Sanderling seems to be interested in exploring it. He's going to conduct the orchestra in Sibelius' En Saga and Symphony No. 7 next season.
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 was the big draw of the evening, and Ferguson was full. The symphony is an iconic work, the Mona Lisa of music. There's an old saw in the orchestra world that no matter how familiar a piece is, there are always people in the hall who are hearing it for the first time, and that certainly appeared to be true on Friday, with quite a few young children in attendance.
But even for old Beethoven hands, there were things to rediscover in the
symphony, such as the short, soft unison notes in the strings before a clarinet
solo in the second movement, or the weird bassoon and contrabassoon play in the
third movement, or the infectious music of the finale that Tchaikovsky borrowed
for The Nutcracker. The Fifth always sounds new in a strong
performance.
Source: St. Petersburg
Times
Published: January 30, 2010
By:
John Fleming
Roaring out of Russia
TAMPA — Nothing succeeds like excess, that seems to be the theme
of the Florida Orchestra's concerts this weekend. The program is all
Tchaikovsky, and why not? About the only time I've heard such roars from the
audience was when the orchestra backed up a Led Zeppelin tribute band a few
weeks ago.
Tchaikovsky and Led Zeppelin … somehow that's a pairing that makes a certain sort of sense, the heavy (metal in the case of Zeppelin) popmeisters of their respective musical genres, a century apart from each other.
Of course, it helped that the orchestra was playing one of Tchaikovsky's greatest hits, the First Piano Concerto, with a steely fingered soloist, Markus Groh, Friday night in Ferguson Hall of the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. He was subbing for the scheduled pianist, Mikhail Rudy, who canceled because he has tendonitis.
Groh, a ponytailed German, deserved every hurrah he got, right from the massive piano chords he laid down to accompany the famous melody in the orchestra that begins the concerto. He has the requisite big sound for such a grand conception, and at times he appeared to be wrestling the music from the piano (this is a fun piece to watch being played), but he also displayed a poetic sensibility in the cadenza of the first movement. He dashed off the speedy dance rhythms of the finale in spectacular fashion.
Music director Stefan Sanderling did well with the most obvious conducting challenge of the concerto when, about midway through the third movement, the tempo lurches slower, like a record suddenly changing speed. It's not Tchaikovsky's finest moment as a composer and can be awkward in performance, but it passed by without incident on Friday.
The orchestra opened the evening with Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony, which is not as familiar as his much-played Pathetique or Little Russian symphonies. "Of all his symphonies, this one is the least conformative to preset schemes and may produce an impression of strangeness," writes Roland John Wiley in his new Tchaikovsky biography. In other words, it has lots of pretty music but is incoherent.
The five-movement symphony was composed around the same time as Swan
Lake, and the fourth movement is reminiscent of the ballet score with its
skittering winds and strings. The third movement is the emotional heart of the
piece and featured excellent work by principal bassoon Anthony
Georgeson.
Source: The Tampa
Tribune
Published: January 20, 2010
By:
Kathy Greenberg
Orchestra, cirque combo returns for another spectacle
Two years ago, Cirque de la Symphonie and The Florida Orchestra
mesmerized audiences with a dramatic blending of two very different art forms.
It was one of the most popular concerts of the 2007-2008 season. This month,
music and magic will converge once again.
Cirque de la Symphonie is a company of aerialists, acrobats, contortionists, dancers, jugglers and strongmen. What it's not is the usual circus troupe, relying on physical skill alone to thrill audiences. Cirque de la Symphonie is, instead, a bridge to an all-encompassing sensory experience.
While an orchestra plays, one to two cirque artists share the stage to perform choreographed acts that have been adapted to the music arrangement. It's "candy for the ears and eyes," aerialist Alexander Streltsov said.
"It's a true collaboration. The blend of cirque with music becomes a creation that you probably wouldn't experience if you go to a regular circus show," said Streltsov, also the company's technical and artistic director.
Streltsov has been executing gravity-defying feats since he was a child in Russia. Born into a circus family, he knew by the age of 2 or 3 that he would be a performer as well. He quickly accumulated awards and landed gigs with TV specials, cirque productions, theaters and orchestras, many of them facilitated by Bill Allen, founder and producer of Cirque de la Symphonie.
Allen had been representing Streltsov and other cirque artists for years when the Cincinnati Orchestra contacted him about incorporating a cirque act into a symphonic program. The subsequent Valentine's Day special led to several more productions, both nationally and internationally. These early successes encouraged Allen to formalize the program and incorporate in 2005.
"I think it's a one-plus-one-equals-three effect," Allen said. "Something magical happens when you fuse these (arts) together. Hands are clasped and tears are rolling down faces in the audience. One of the things I think is cool about this is that it's drawn not just children with grandparents, but young adults."
For the January program, Streltsov will join strongmen Jarek and Darek, aerialist Aloysia Gavre, contortionist Elena Tsarkova, juggler Vladimir Tsarkov and seven-time National Champion and Olympian Christine Van Loo. But be forewarned: These lithe talents make the improbable look easy enough for anyone to do. It's not.
"One woman said her 16-year-old daughter wound up on a curtain trying
to repeat what I did," Streltsov recalled. "We need a big sign that says, 'Don't
try this at home.'"
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Published: January 14, 2010
By: John Fleming
Led Zeppelin tribute band, Florida Orchestra will rock at Ruth Eckerd Hall on Saturday
Brent Havens remembers well the first time he put together the music of Led Zeppelin with a symphony orchestra. It was 1995 and he tried out the concept with the Virginia Symphony.
"We had no idea how it would do, so we put the concert in a 1,000-seat theater,'' says Havens, an arranger and conductor who lives in Virginia Beach. "It sold out in one day. And we went — oh, hello, that was pretty interesting.''
Thus was spawned a lucrative cottage industry that marries rock and classical music and brings sizable new audiences to symphony orchestras. Havens and his Zeppelin show are featured with the Florida Orchestra at Ruth Eckerd Hall on Saturday.
There's nothing new about joining rock and classical music. In the glory days of prog-rock in the 1960s and '70s, crossover giants walked the Earth: Procol Harum, the Moody Blues, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and others flirted with symphony orchestras.
And there have been lots of sweeping strings set to rock, from the Beatles' The Long and Winding Road to the brilliant pairing of Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony on the album S&M.
Led Zeppelin got the treatment by the London Philharmonic in Kashmir: The Symphonic Led Zeppelin, but that 1997 album was more symphonic than Zep, with no vocals, guitar, drums or bass. In Havens' show, the orchestra basically serves as the backup band to five rockers, including Randy Jackson (lead singer of the band Zebra) making like Robert Plant.
"There's full rock lighting with fog and the mirror ball and the whole deal,'' Havens says. "The entire orchestra is miked. So it's not a pops type of concert. It's an out and out rock show.''
Havens, 53, is founder of Windborne Music, which has five different classic rock shows for which he writes the orchestra arrangements and conducts. Along with Zeppelin there are shows for Pink Floyd, the Eagles, the Doors and the newest one, Queen.
A year ago, the Florida Orchestra did the Pink Floyd show at Mahaffey Theater, and attendance was a robust 1,781, more than 90 percent of capacity. "Not only was it a full house, but it was a new audience for the orchestra,'' says Sherry Powell, marketing and communications director. "It's so nice to be able to do something relevant to people who don't normally come to orchestra concerts.''
However, there isn't much evidence that the orchestra's forays into the likes of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and other special shows build the audience for mainstream classical fare. "A couple of years ago we did the Lord of the Rings Symphony, and they were well attended,'' says Henry Adams, associate director of marketing and communications. "Very few people who bought those tickets came to other concerts.''
Havens has arrangements for 30 Led Zeppelin songs, and Saturday's concert will feature about 18 of them, no doubt including such favorites as Black Dog, Going to California and, yes, Stairway to Heaven. He essentially transcribes the rock band parts, because that's what fans expect to hear.
"It's astounding how well these people know this music,'' Havens says. "They know lick for lick on the guitar, every nuance of the phrasing of the lyrics. That's why we try to keep it close to the original. I think I'd be disappointed if I went to a concert and heard somebody's interpretation of Zeppelin.''
So does that mean guitarist George Cintron can match the great Jimmy Page?
"He has the style down,'' Havens says. "Most of the solos are note for note. The Heartbreaker solo, where it's all guitar, he steps out and does a five-, six-minute piece all by himself. It's certainly in the vein.''
And drummer Powell Randolph does the big Moby Dick solo that John Bonham did, though not for the 20 minutes that Bonzo usually took up. "I don't let Powell go on that long. But it is an amazing solo,'' Havens says.
Havens was originally drawn to Led Zeppelin because one of the group's greatest hits, Kashmir, already featured strings and brass. His challenge in writing orchestration for the songs was to keep the charts interesting.
"That was really the critical thing, that it didn't come out cheesy or cheap sounding,'' he says. "I wanted to give it the elegance that it deserved.''
Havens didn't want the orchestra just playing whole notes behind the band. "Avoiding the footballs (whole notes) is always one of my big concerns,'' he says. "But for a couple of tunes you almost need that. Like in Going to California I have lush strings behind it. For the majority of the tunes I'll have counterpoint melodies and lots of rich harmonic structures in the orchestra.''
Even after years of labor on arrangements of Zeppelin's music, Havens
remains a fan of the heavy metal legends. "The rhythmic and harmonic
complexities they were using — the open tunings in guitars and the chords on top
of chords — are still intriguing to me. I had a much greater respect for them
after I transcribed all the music than I did going into it.''
Source: The Tampa
Tribune
Published: January 10, 2010
By:
Buddy Jaudon
Concert shows light, dark side
TAMPA - Herman Melville said, "There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast." On Friday night at the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts, contrasting sides of two composers were juxtaposed in The Florida Orchestra's concert of works by Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich.
The night began with Strauss' lighter side. "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," a piece which describes the exploits of a legendary practical joker, was given an occasionally rambunctious outing, with concertmaster Jeffrey Multer's contribution in the love theme a standout, and fine playing by French horns and trumpets throughout.
The first contrast was then offered in the shape of Strauss' "Death and Transfiguration," one of the composer's early tone poems and a very serious work indeed.
The essential thing with this piece is that the portions depicting the physical pain of the dying man be forceful enough to create the proper feeling of horror, from which the transfiguration music at the end is an antidote.
There was no problem with either part Friday, with the brass and timpani offering ferocious interruptions of string and woodwind reveries, and the entire orchestra making the final bars radiant and sublime. Principal oboe Katherine Young's performance was lovely and precise in the quieter sections.
The second half of the program contained only a single work, but it offered stark contrasts of its own. The Sixth Symphony of Shostakovich is a work in three movements. The long, slow, serious first movement is balanced by two shorter and lighter ones, the second of which should sound nearly hysterical in its enforced optimism.
Music director Stefan Sanderling, who conducted the entire concert
sitting down, gave the music a reading which was perfectly controlled in the
tense first movement, and fittingly manic in the finale. The entire woodwind
section was exceptional in this piece, with Lewis Sligh's piccolo work a
particular pleasure.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Published: January 9, 2010
By: John Fleming
Shostakovich concert strikes personal chord
TAMPA — Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6 has personal meaning for Stefan Sanderling. It was responsible for him becoming a conductor, the Florida Orchestra music director said in a pre-concert talk Friday night. More than 20 years ago, living in his native East Germany, Sanderling wanted to be a musicologist, but when he wrote a politically incorrect program note about the symphony that displeased Communist authorities, that academic career was closed to him. So he had no choice but to become a conductor.
The Sixth Symphony is one of Shostakovich's less familiar works, an odd, beautiful, haunting creation that the orchestra performed for its first program of the new decade at Morsani Hall of the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. Perhaps because of a physical issue, Sanderling led while seated in a chair, but his conducting was no less vigorous.
The symphony is unusual in that it has three movements, instead of the conventional four, and starts with a giant largo that, at 20 minutes long, takes up almost two-thirds of the piece. Much of the movement was played exceedingly softly, and it featured the most amazing collection of solos for piccolo, flute, bass clarinet, English horn and others. All this, taken at a very deliberate pace by Sanderling, seemed as if it shouldn't have held together, but it did in spellbinding fashion.
The second movement had the sardonic woodwinds that are a Shostakovich trademark, but what really took off was the finale, with its effervescent classical quickness in the strings (reminiscent, in fact, of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony).
The first half of Friday's concert was taken up by a pair of Richard
Strauss symphonic tone poems, full of the picturesque instrumental writing that
led the way to the composer's brilliant operas. Geoff Pilkington, the guest
principal French horn, deftly handled the tricky rhythms of his solo that opened
Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, but the reprise could have been projected more
forcefully. Death and Transfiguration was glorious in its metamorphosis from a
gloomy C-minor chord at the beginning into heavenly, harp-laden C-major at the
end.
