two concerts in a day

It was going to be three, but going up to the City for a morning string quartet event and then dashing back down here for the afternoon seemed a bit much to attempt in the current state. So two it was, both community orchestra events in my local area.

The Winchester Orchestra under James Beauton essayed a Halloween concert. It had both Danse Macabre (excellent solo work by concertmaster Bill Palmer) and Night on Bald Mountain (the old, Rimsky-edited version of Mussorgsky's score). It had Stokowski's arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, favorite music of evil scientist organists everywhere. The orchestra struggled with the beginning of the fugue. It had a dance from The Firebird, and they struggled even more with that. It had music from two movies, Psycho (with the conductor making a stabbing motion with the baton when we got to that scene, as if the music wasn't clue enough) and The Mummy Returns. And we had a ten-minute précis of Johan de Meij's Lord of the Rings Symphony in an orchestrated version (the original is for concert band). It summarized up three of the five movements: Gandalf, Lothlórien, and Hobbits, and they did that one very well.

The Palo Alto Philharmonic under Lara Webber began with Of Paradise and Light by Augusta Read Thomas for strings, a weak echo of Barber's Adagio, and continued with the Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra by Vaughan Williams. This concerto, for that's what it is, in eight short movements is from VW's pastoral side with no hint of the hairier directions his music was taking by 1934 when he wrote this. But it's not top-drawer VW pastoral either, though soloist Jenny Douglass played very well. For a conclusion, Brahms's First. There was some blattiness, but for the most part this came off lucidly and excitingly. This work is naturally very heavy, but here it was both light and powerful, a nice trick if you can pull it off.