Impresario Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now of Bard College presented at Carnegie Hall – Exodus: Jewish Composers in Exile. This intriguing program title represented the product of Botstein’s brilliant artistic craft and expertise. In addition to a set of rare musical gems bound by history, two New York City premieres were on the program.
The conductor and music director of the ASO, Maestro Leon Botstein, came to the stage. Building anticipation for the concert, he explained that tonight’s program featured musical works of American composers from the Roaring 20s. Botstein delivered a mini musicology introduction for each work. His words thus inspired listeners and brought the music to life, making it relevant, tangible, and understandable.
In 2015, Maestro David Bernard of the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony began his examination into how orchestras might increase their success with the classical music world’s biggest challenge—audience growth. Bernard pondered the difference between people who are classical music enthusiasts—and those less informed about classical music. Bernard hypothesized that the main difference is the lack of an immersive classical music experience in the lives of those who have yet to discover the beauty and power of music. At this moment, the concept of Bernard’s now well-known “InsideOut” was born, and in the coming seasons, he incorporated a new kind of immersive strategy into symphonic concerts. With each successive event, he “tweaked” the model, ultimately developing an approach toward maximizing immersion in classical music concerts.
This auspicious event was the fruit of an esteemed collaboration between the Kaufman Music Center and the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony. Gifted young artists competed for the opportunity to grace the stage and perform major musical works with a symphony orchestra before a packed house in a remarkable concert space.
Performed by the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony at today’s two concerts was Sergei Prokofiev’s delightful Peter and the Wolf featuring WQXR evening host and luminary Terrance McKnight. In this symphonic fairy tale for children, Prokofiev introduced storytelling, the instruments of the orchestra, and abstract thinking associated with how sound can represent images and ideas. This delightful, imaginative experience was pedagogically exceptional for engaging cognitive functions related to symbolic representation, conceptualization, and metaphorical thinking. Most importantly, it was engaging and fun.
The American Classical Orchestra ascended to the stage before a packed house in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. Under the baton of conductor Thomas Crawford, the concert began with Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell Overture (1829). Marvelously performed by the ACO, this work resides in the canon of intensely popular music. It was received by the audience akin to the intense adulation witnessed at its performance at the Paris Opéra in 1929.
Experiencing the ineffable, expressive unfolding of the music while seated among the musicians was, without exaggeration, an exalted, rapturous, and elegiac pluradimensional experience. The blinding radiance and pathos of these moments were to reoccur in the Symphony’s successive musical offerings slated for this evening.
With this performance, the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony has fervidly conquered Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, bringing its ineffable, sumptuous beauty and afflatus to life. When listening, one is philosophically transported through time, space, and existence while envisaging the chimera of eternal questions facing humankind.
Tonight’s concert was entitled Organ and Orchestra by the American Symphony Orchestra! St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Park Ave in New York City was the apposite venue for Maestro Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra. They performed two works incorporating the rich sounds of the marvelous Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ with organist Paolo Bordignon, the Bard Festival Chorale directed by James Bagwell, and vocal soloists Soprano Anya Matanovič, Mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti, Tenor Joshua Blue, and Bass Adam Lau.
This notable variety of musical works is apposite for The Orchestra Now, an ensemble of young professionals assembling to hone their skills for careers in music around the world. This evening, under the able baton of conductor Zachary Schwartzman, these artists expanded their repertoire and contexts for their future challenges. Each work provided ample opportunity for solos, marvelous brass, string and wind tuttis, lush strings, and musical poetry.
