The Hillsdale College Symphony Orchestra will fill Markel Auditorium with the sounds of a Suffolk fishing town this weekend in its annual spring concert.
The “Four Sea Interludes,” selections from the opera “Peter Grimes” by British composer Benjamin Britten, challenge musicians to bring the salty air of the sea and scenes of village living in a seaside hamlet to the audience.
“Not many of my peers would attempt Britten’s piece, but our orchestra keeps growing in their skill level and I wanted to challenge them,” Music Department Chair James Holleman said. “It’s a very beautiful and intense piece, not something you would have heard in Bugs Bunny or in a commercial.”
Last year, senior violinist Taylor Flowers included Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” in a selection of music he suggested to Holleman for the 2015-2016 orchestra repertoire.
“I’m thrilled that we can try to tackle such a complex work,” Flowers said. “It’s one of the most purely modern pieces that the orchestra has done in a good while, at least while I have been here.”
Flowers described the modern character of “Interludes” as highlighting the distinctive sound of instruments independent of intensity and pitch, a quality musicians call timbre.
“In the third movement, ‘Moonlight,’ the flute and piccolos play this percussive, pingy motive over and over which represents the striking of contrast of stars against the night sky,” Flowers said. “That kind of pingy percussive sound is evocative in that context because if it was a cello, the effect would have a completely different,” Flowers said.
The orchestra program also includes George Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture” and the overture from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, “Nabucco.” The second half of the concert will feature two of this year’s four concerto winners: junior violinist Rachelle Ferguson playing Henri Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concerto No. 5 and sophomore cellist Gregory Farison playing Camille Saint-Saens’ Cello Concerto No. 2.
Holleman plans to record the orchestra’s spring program and use it as an audition CD when he attends the National College Orchestra Director’s Association Conference (CODA) next year. More than 200 conductors nationwide from schools of various sizes belong to CODA. Judged in a blind audition, Hillsdale’s orchestra would face competition from large state schools.
Holleman is not daunted.
“With a clean recording, these are impressive pieces for any size school,” he said. “I’ve been going to the national conference for the past four years, gauging our orchestra against the ones that are performing, and I think we have a shot at it.”
Holleman said that the talent of concerto winners Ferguson and Farison also give this weekend’s concert a special energy, a program of music that shouldn’t be missed.