BY PETER HUMMERS | A lively overflow audience chattered excitedly while the Virginia Symphony tuned up onstage at the Outer Banks Forum for the Lively Arts Saturday evening.
Seated on the full stage in front of four new giant white sound baffles, the searching musicians sounded like a Charles Ives symphony.
The players were in formal attire and the citizens of the Outer Banks made an effort to dress up too. Collared shirts and even sport jackets were in abundance.
The tuning went on until 7:45 when Forum president John Tucker stepped up to the microphone to introduce the orchestra to the 600 in the audience.
Maestro JoAnn Falletta strode to the podium. A slight woman in black, she assumed definitive control over the musicians and directed them with a sure hand in Mozart’s overture to his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio.
It was a smooth, note-perfect performance. Maestro Falletta is a conductor of great reknown who has appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the London Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the National Symphony, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. The musicians under her baton tonight rightly belong in that company; she has led them since 1991.
The evening’s program was "Turkish Delights" and the Mozart overture combined his idea of "Oriental" or "Turkish" music with his own European traditions, which made for some great melodic ideas.
Some of Mozart’s "Turkish" music was included in the Rondeau movement of his Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, next on the program.
Concertmaster Vahn Armstrong was the star of this concerto. He held his violin in place with his chin while he waited for his cue. He played a long solo in the Allegro aperto with an impeccable tone and fine control while behind him Maestro Falletta carried on with her large gestures.
At times she led the orchestra while staring over her shoulder at Armstrong’s hands.
During his solos, which were peppered with double-stops so that he sounded like two violinists, the musicians and especially the strlng section watched him intently.
The brilliant Armstrong is also Concertmaster of the Virginia Opera. During the summer he serves as Concertmaster for Chautauqua Opera and Associate Concertmaster of the Chautauqua Symphony in Chautauqua, New York.
The string section played with feeling and velvety precision. The cellos and basses at stage left balanced them perfectly and out of the center of this sonic cornucopia came Armstrong’s pure violin.
The timing under Maestro Falletta’s direction was perfect — and nobody put a note wrong. It was the kind of performance you’d expect on a recording, only the sound was better than any sound system could deliver.
Armstrong came out for three curtain calls.
During the intermission the woodwinds, largely overshadowed during the first part of the evening, tweaked their tunings and compared notes.
The horns, too, returned to the stage early and began their preparations.
Forum president Tucker resumed the program with news of next season’s performers, which will include actress and singer Linda Lavin, the NC Master Chorale Chamber Choir and the return of the Virginia Symphony.
The orchestra resumed their performance with Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Concerto Grosso (To Handel’s Sonata in D Major), which was composed in 1985 to commemorate the tercentennial of George Frideric Handel’s birth.
It is based on the first movement of Handel’s Sonata for Violin and Continuo, Op.1, No.13, but is thoroughly modern, including sheets of sound accompanied by a harpsichord punctuated by cometimes-dischordant horn parts and cellos and basses playing almost violin parts.
In the presto movement the cellos played a pulsing industrial-sounding foundation in unison while the violins took the top end and the woodwinds and horns played accents. The clean, airy chords recalled Aaron Copland, the violins playing long unbroken lines to the throbbing basses.
The last piece of the evening was Igor Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite, which follows in his canon the revolutionary Rite of Spring. Commissioned by Russian ballet-master Sergey Diaghilev after World War I, Pulcinella, and the suite, which Stravinsky reorchestrated in 1947, is a return to the melodic eighteenth-century Slavonic tradition, leavened with Stravinsky’s idiosyncracies. Maestro Falletta and her orchestra were as much at-home in the twentieth as in the eighteenth century.
The anticipation of the huge audience that brought them to the First Flight High School was well and truly met and they responded with an honest standing ovation.
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