GREENSBORO – The Green Mountain Youth Symphony, now in its twenty-fifth season, gave an impressive concert at the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro last Saturday evening, featuring works by Telemann, Dvorak, with a specially commissioned piece in the first half of the program and four movie music selections in the second half. There are about thirty musicians in the orchestra, with just a few older artists filling in some of the bass positions. Robert Blais was the very competent conductor.
The “Viola Concerto in G Major” by Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) highlighted Isla Robechek in a very professional performance on viola. In the first slow movement, she brought out the fine sonorous tone in the range of the instrument, with a depth of color in her sensitive bowing. The second section was a lively melody with baroque elaborations, while the third part had a stately tempo and a short solo cadenza. The last movement showed fast fingering in its scoring, which Robechek played with precision and expressive feeling.
“These Green Mountains” was an orchestral arrangement of the Vermont State Anthem by Callum Robechek, based on the original theme by Diane Martin and Rita Buglass which won a competition several years ago. It has heartfelt and poetic lyrics, which conductor Blais read, and an engaging melody that was nicely transcribed here.
“Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95,” the “New World:” by Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904), was written in 1893 while he was teaching in New York City and visiting settlements of immigrants from his own country of Czechoslovakia in the Midwest. In it he draws on both Afro-American and Native American sources for inspiration, one of the first classical music composers to do so. The Green Mountain Youth Symphony skillfully played the fourth movement, which has a number of beautiful melodies that utilize the full resources of the orchestra dramatically, building up to a triumphant ending.
Following intermission the group presented music from film scores, beginning with an arrangement from “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” by John Williams. It started off with a prominent trumpet part and then distinct marching rhythms, with a touch of a mariachi element in the brasses, presumably referring to the setting of the movie in Mexico, where in the National Art Museum there is an Aztec crystal skull.
Selections from “Les Miserables” by Claude Michel Schönberg featured the clarinet, flute, trombone, and French horns as well as percussive texture in this cinema version of Hugo’s novel.
Chuck Mangione composed the score accompanying “The Children of Sanchez,” which came out in 1979. Again there was a slightly Latin flavor to the rhythms and themes. The last number was music by Klaus Badelt for “Pirates of the Caribbean,” which had a series of crescendos emphasizing the brasses and drums in its orchestral meaning.
The Green Mountain Youth Symphony provides an invaluable experience to young musicians to play with disciplined coordination the rich repertoire of orchestral music written over the past few centuries. To have the opportunity to create such beauty and share it with the public is a real blessing, both a personal and community builder.
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
