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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

St. Olaf College may be best known for its Christmas Festival broadcast (this year will mark its 100^th anniversary) focusing on the vast choral tradition of the school’s Lutheran/Nordic heritage. After hearing the school’s orchestra, it is safe to say that the choirs are in good company. Monday night’s performance at Blue Valley West High School’s Performing Arts Center was a quintessential tour program: entertaining, great repertoire, and excellent playing.

Hector Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture began the evening. Though I have yet to hear any orchestra, recorded or live, make sense of the first odd bars, the subsequent English horn solo was strong and plaintive as it sounded the love theme from his failed opera, Benvenuto Cellini. The main body of strings produced great tone and focused pitch. Many orchestra directors at larger schools would love to have the St. Olaf low string sections at their institutions.

Matthew Peterson’s Hyperborea received its premiere performances on this tour. The St. Olaf alumnus’ score was in vogue with some of today’s orchestral compositional giants. The piece recalled Theofanidis’ optimism (go hear Topeka Symphony play his Rainbow Body at the end of the month for further clarification), Higdon’s manic energy, and Rouse’s slow solemnity. Hyperborea showed Peterson’s skilled orchestration and well-conceived form. Harmonic arpeggiations were a recurring motive over lush pads of shifting timbres. Peterson has a knack for string writing, but some of the woodwind parts seemed unwieldy. He wisely avoided a crashing ending in favor of subtlety. The student orchestra performed the new work admirably and with conviction. Frankly, it was one of the finest recent orchestral compositions I've heard in many years. I wish Maestro Amundson hadn’t felt the need to apologize afterward for playing new music. This was especially unnecessary for a piece as accessible as Hyperborea and when the ensemble would be playing a more listener-challenging work—Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony—later in the program. There was nothing in the piece that listeners wouldn’t regularly hear in any film or television score.

Greta Bauer, a third-year violinist at St. Olaf, was soloist for the final movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major. The solo technical aspects of the gypsy-inspired movement were played well, but her intonation faltered on some of the lyrical passages. She was also forced to play quite loudly as the accompaniment was overzealous.

Ending with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 revealed both the brilliance of the ensemble and where they are still developing into mature musicians. The strings, in particular the low strings again, were strong throughout. Kudos go to principals Audrey Slote and Evan Anderson on their readily apparent leadership. I was prepared to cringe in the third movement because of the extreme ranges in the violins, but the ensemble was clearly well rehearsed and my fretting was for naught. It was in the winds' phrase endings that the age of the ensemble peeked through; these endings were frequently unpolished and the shapes lacked nuance. As the low brass approached fortissimo, the section’s sound became blatty. Aside from those quibbles, I like my Shostakovich fast and bombastic, and the fourth movement fulfilled those desires in spades. 

REVIEW:
St. Olaf Orchestra
St. Olaf Orchestra Fall Tour 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
Blue Valley West High School Performing Arts Center
16200 Antioch, Overland Park, KS
For more information, visit http://stolaftickets.com

By Lee Hartman

Editor-in-Chief; Traditional and New Classical Contributor

Lee Hartman holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (D.M.A., M.M.) and the University of Delaware (B.M.). At the University of Delaware, he received a Dean's Scholar position enabling him to pursue an individually designed academic program combining music education and composition. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City he served for three years as the Assistant Director to Musica Nova, the conservatory's new music ensemble, while teaching a variety of composition classes.

In 2007 he was invited to both the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík, Iceland and the Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu, China to give lectures and master classes in composition. In the summer of 2009, Hartman served as an orchestra manager for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Aspen Opera Theater Center for various performances. He serves on the National Executive Committee of the Society of Composers, Inc. as Submissions Coordinator. His primary composition instructors include James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Paul Rudy, John Beall, and Jennifer Margaret Barker. He currently teaches music theory at the University of Central Missouri and general music classes at Park University having previously taught at UD (2007–08) and UMKC (2006–07).

His compositions can be found at http://www.leehartmanmusic.com