The Hillsdale College Symphony Orchestra.
Courtesy | Hillsdale College
Picture rugged mountains, coarse sand, and salty sea waves as they crash against the rocks. This is what Felix Mendelssohn encountered when he visited the Hebrides, an island chain off Scotland’s west coast. Hillsdale’s symphony orchestra will perform the German composer’s translation of his experience, “Die Hebrides,” at its Saturday concert.
The orchestra will also perform pieces by Edvard Grieg and Ludwig van Beethoven at the concert, starting at 8 p.m. Junior Hannah Wong, winner of this year’s concerto competition, will join the orchestra and play the piano for the third movement of Grieg’s “Concerto in A Minor.”
“I’m not sure how to feel because this is my first time playing with a live orchestra, and I’ve never done it before,” Wong said. “I’ve done a few rehearsals, and it’s definitely coming together.”
Orchestra Conductor James Holleman said he picked this year’s program specifically because of the instrumentation. Since the college’s jazz band will be traveling to the Elmhurst Jazz Festival in Illinois, the orchestra will have a smaller trumpet section and the trombone section will be gone.
“This was a great opportunity to do late classical music,” Holleman said. “So we’re doing Beethoven. I love to do Beethoven. It’s really important to do. He’s brilliant. It’s just that he rarely calls for trombones, tubas, and a lot of percussion.”
Junior Elena Bull said she is excited to play more classical songs at the upcoming concert.
“The program is pretty standard classical, which is not something we usually do, but I really like the music, and the structure follows the typical overture, concerto, symphony, format,” Bull said. “People are so interested in branching out of that now that nobody actually still does that. I’m glad that we’re doing something so traditional, and I think it’ll be pretty well received, just because who doesn’t like Beethoven?”
Bull recommended concertgoers to look up a picture of the Hebrides, a group of islands on Scotland’s west coast, before the concert.
“The song is very pictorial,” Bull said. “You can picture mountains and ocean waves.”
Holleman said it is rare to see the quality of a symphony orchestra at a school as small as Hillsdale.
“People should come just to embrace the fact that we have this live animal, this symphony orchestra,” Holleman said. “A lot of cities in this country are losing funding for orchestras. It takes a lot of money to support an orchestra in a community.”
The concert should end around 9:30 p.m., according to Holleman.
“The concert is a nice opportunity to slip out and attend something,” he said. “The students are so busy, and they’re so loaded with their academics, to just go sit in this magnificent building, this chapel that we have, and take in this orchestra concert. I think it’s such a break from studying. It’s such a break from everything else they’re doing.”
Holleman said that students should take advantage of having an orchestra concert to attend that does not cost a penny.
“Nobody on this campus, if you live on campus, is more than five minutes away to walk over, take in a concert, and then go on about whatever else they were doing. It’s so easy,” he said. “If you’re in a large city — parking, getting tickets, expensive tickets — it would be several hours of having to leave your house, get there, do everything, come back. Where, here, you can just slip out, go up and hear this concert, see your friends on stage, and then go about your Saturday night.”
