BY PETER HUMMERS | What a thing to see is a symphony orchestra! The ultimate tool of composers, they are capable of producing almost any sound that can be imagined. And in concert, the several dozen musicians, when they are as good as the Virginia Symphony, can induce emotions from melancholy to euphoria.
The orchestra was sedulously tuning their instruments as the audience entered the First Flight High School Sunday afternoon for the last concert of the 2007-8 Outer Banks Forum for the Lively Arts season. When Forum president John Tucker took the stage and stood at the microphone, the musicians quieted; the audience didn’t. The tympanist played a mighty roll on his big drum and the audience caught on, falling silent.
So far, there are 460 subscriptions for the next season, Tucker announced, along with the news that longtime Forum benefactors Edward Greene and Richard LaCerre, who thought they were retired, turned out to be not quite, and were reopening their popular Christmas Shop, to the benefit of the town of Manteo and customers near and far.
Conductor Michael Kraemer strode onstage in a Nehru suit and the orchestra commenced Mickhail Glinka’s overture to his opera Russlan and Ludmilla. The concert was titled “Openers and Closers” and the pieces were mostly overtures, with a final finale.
The musicians demonstrated their prowess from the beginning. The youthful conductor led them confidently and unerringly through the sprightly piece with nary a wrong note. On the contrary, the orchestra was having a very good afternoon; if it were a recording session, they would have had it in one take.
Kraemer described overtures as the composer plagiarising himself. The overture was the last part of the opera to be written, and, in the days of Gioachino Rossini, written under intense pressure, as operas were the popular entertainment of the day, and the cities of Europe were filled with opera houses. So composers such as Rossini strung together excerpts from their new operas and became expert at transitions, with the result that the overture became an art form in itself, a sort of opera in miniature, without words, not to mention suitable as a programmatic element for symphony orchestra concerts.
The overture to Rossini’s 1817 opera Cinderella came next, cinematically opening on a quiet vista where dramatic elements presented themselves in turn. Variations on a few themes were assayed; the overture indeed took on the aspect of a little jewel, reflecting its surroundings (the opera) with many sparkling facets.
Kraemer apologized for his suit (which looked fine); he said he bought it on Amazon.com, and would not buy any more clothes without trying them on. The fit was good, but he had trouble raising his arms, he said, and demonstrated to the audience what the orchestra saw, his shoulders bunched around his ears with his arms up.
The orchestra played a Broadway piece, a medley from Meredith Wilson’s Music Man. Kraemer had the trombonists take a bow for their yeoman work on the “Seventy-Six Trombones” segment. Again, all the musicians were on a roll and playing perfectly, to these ears.
Before and after the intermission the orchestra played Antonín Dvořák, first his Carnival overture and then Op. 45, No. 8, from his 1878 collection Slavonic Dances. This was followed by the overture from Otto Nicolai’s operetta, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Operetta was the ancestor of Broadway, Kraemer said, and while posterity hasn’t been especially kind to Nicolai, at least this excellent piece has become a staple of the concert repertoire.
A medley from Cole Porter’s 1948 show Kiss Me Kate enthralled the audience, who were urged to sing along if they liked. “But remember, it’s a medley, so it will change quickly,” said Kraemer. The audience did sing along, and well — including an infant who yowled on cue and in key during a silence, drawing big smiles from the conductor and his musicians.
After the closer, the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, which featured shimmering glissandi from the violins engaging thundering brass, the audience leapt to their feet and Kraemer ran offstage. He came back for two curtain calls while his musicians stood and sat and stood again. The house lights came up and the gratified audience filed out, their memories of the evening vying with anticipation of the next season of concerts from the Outer Banks Forum.
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