The Middlebury Campus

Issue date: 5/2/07 Section: Arts

Media Credit: Nirvana Bhatia Conductor Troy Peters solicits dynamic performance from improved orchestra. [Click to enlarge]

When Associate Professor of Music Greg Vitercik commented on the College orchestra's significant improvement since last year he did not hesitate to gloat. "We can do anything we want to now," said Vitercik. This certainly proved true at Thursday evening's concert in the Center for the Arts Concert Hall featuring two of the better known compositions in the orchestral repertoire - Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," and Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, the "New World." In addition to these two blockbusters, Sally Swallow '07, the winner of this year's Alan and Joyce Beucher Concerto Competition, sang the show piece "Glitter and be Gay" from Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide.

From the opening of "A Night on Bald Mountain," the orchestra's improvements were evident. The winds matched the strings in volume, and the brass showed a confidence that was not apparent in December's concert. When the orchestra played together, particularly in louder sections, it sounded excellent. Unfortunately, when individual sections played alone, the imperfections were slightly more noticeable.

One understands upon hearing a full orchestra, particularly a competent one, that the concert hall is better suited for chamber music than symphonies. For example, at times during the Mussorgsky piece the percussion was deafening, while the slow section that ended the work exposed some of the expected intonation problems in the string section. The paltry sound of the "church bells" that ended the so-called "Black Sabbath" was a hint at a need for better percussion instruments as well. The effect, however, was exactly what Mussorgsky intended as the spirit of the performers was obvious to everyone.

The highlight of the concert was Dvorak's perennially popular symphony, written as a model for what American music should have been at a time when America's cultural significance was being called into question.

In a nod to the European tradition, Dvorak makes extensive allusions to Beethoven's ninth symphony, most obviously with the third movement's falling fifths and the insistent timpani parts. The fourth movement is one of my favorites, partly because it exposes John Williams as a fraud. The opening figure of the strings is undoubtedly the basis for "Jaws." The brass section carried the famous melody, the basis for the imperial march of the popular "Star Wars" films, utterly convincingly. They sounded professional if not for slight rhythmic unevenness.

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