BRATTLEBORO — In celebration of its 44th season, the Windham Orchestra will perform two Fourth Symphonies, and premiere the works of four local composers during the 2013-14 concert season.
On Sunday, Oct, 27 in Brattleboro, and Friday, Nov. 1 in Westminster, under the direction of Hugh Keelan, the orchestra will open its season with “The Social Waltzes” of Frederick Palmer, Brattleboro's postmaster from 1845-1848, arranged for orchestra by Maestro Keelan; Brandenburg's Concerto No. 2; and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4.
Featured in the Brandenburg concerto are soloists Jessica Moreau, oboe; Peggy Spencer, violin; Dan Farina, trumpet; and Jacob Mashak, recorder (“flauto dolce”).
Palmer was a dental surgeon, lawyer, postmaster of Brattleboro, socialite and family man, organist, violinist, flutist and composer, distinguished and infamous, accomplished and amateur, mysterious and death-bound...a variegated and rich being, and the Orchestra's first “Citizen Composer” to be featured this season.
Dr. Palmer's string of 'social' dances comprises five waltzes and a schottische composed in 1844.. The music completely charms with its simple contrasts, and invites a question or two: one passage that refers to Mozart's Rondo alla Turca has some puzzling harmonies that do not fit easily into basic theory and part-writing, and if there are printing errors, the corrections are not obvious.
In Keelan's arrangement for the Windham Orchestra, the brass are invited to challenge what they hear, and to do their best to provide a sensible correction when they get their turn. In another waltz strain, the placement of repeats is not clear, and Keelan's arrangement gives a deliberate glimpse of what it is like when some players take a repeat, others don't and then adapt with different solutions.
The confusion reveals that other social music is playing in the distance, unnoticed in the physical and social excitement of the moment. These are normal phenomena as musicians read through repetitive social dance music, perhaps at sight, likely unnoticed by those who aren't playing. Keelan has included parts for parlor organ of the times, to be played on an Estey instrument.
Bach's groundbreaking Brandenburg Concertos, brings us Concerto No. 2, in which a great conversation develops among the featured solo instruments. The Orchestra builds this performance from our rich local resources; the instruments and individuals available, their sounds and personalities, their strengths and preferences.
There is no attempt at 'authenticity' or the imagined re-creation of a performance style, either from Bach's or modern times. All speeds, phrasings, articulations and balances of sound belong uniquely to Dan, Jacob, Jessica, Pedro (playing solo cello continuo) and Peggy, each with their own instruments and personal inflections.
Maestro Keelan invites the audience to “imagine five long-lost school friends (the soloists) reconnecting at a large reunion, filtering off in shifting sets of two, three and four to talk with and about one another. For a period, one of the friends is absent, and there is a sadness. However each and all live inside the bond of their shared experience, continually returning to the larger group (the orchestra).”
Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 is one of the great pieces of symphonic architecture, the opening movement rivals the towering and most subtle and complex first movements of Beethoven. The body of the movement is a very 'anti-social' waltz in a pervasive minor mood, swinging from icy to volcanic.
The remaining three movements could almost be contained in the 20-minute tragic canvas of the first. Although still in a minor key, the texture lightens dramatically for the solos of the canzona, soft and plangent.
A simple set of pizzicato cadential chords ushers in the third movement the orchestra disintegrates into three musical territories that overlap but never align. The plucked strings, play with intriguing asymmetries and capricious dynamics. The brass play a stiff little toy march, always softly. The woodwinds play a peasant dance with grotesque rhythms, stomping and looping repetition. Once done, they permit themselves sneers and cackles about the other two groups, pointedly never joining in.
The Finale, except for a brutal intrusion, is fiery and brilliant. This intrusion is the inevitable return of Fate, the theme announced by brass at the outset of the symphony, woven into the structure of the first movement, and pushing it to a breathless, unforgiving finish. The opening theme is then apparently out of mind until the ghastly interruption at the height of festivities. The music recovers from the interruption after quaking in silence. Did we know all along it was coming back?