B. liked the program, so she came along with me to this concert by a community orchestra of which she was briefly a member a while ago until deciding against spending all her time rehearsing orchestral music she hadn't chosen and playing it at breakneck speed (which they're still doing).
I'd heard that music director Scott Seaton had resigned to take another post, but he was still there.
The strings sounded lovely, the winds were placid instead of piquant, but the brass were bold and coarse. This worked well in a hopping dance from de Falla's Three-Cornered Hat and the stark opening chords of Sibelius' Finlandia, not so well for a haunting horn theme in Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending.
Soloist for the Lark was the orchestra's concertmaster, Bill Palmer, who played with a wonderfully sweet tone. For all his technical imperfections, and there were more than a few, this was a generous and rewarding performance.
For a big concluding work, Schumann's Fourth Symphony, my favorite of his, a performance strong on the dark and brooding and light on the coy and fluttering. Glad to have had this.
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