The music of creative partnerships
Howard County Concert Orchestra mixes and matches in ‘Perfect Pairs'
The Howard County Concert Orchestra has been exploring new venues and other organizational pairings. That expansive spirit explains the title of its next program, “Perfect Pairs,” which is on Sunday, April 17, at 4 p.m. at St. John's Episcopal Church in Ellicott City.
“This season we began to pair up with other venues such as Howard Community College and First Evangelical Lutheran Church, and so this concert is a culmination” of that effort, said Howard County Concert Orchestra music director Ronald Mutchnik.
Although St. John's Episcopal Church is the orchestra's longtime home base and hence qualifies as a familiar partner, the program otherwise was put together with some of the new partnerships in mind.
One such freshly implemented partnership involves the orchestra and the Howard County Public Schools. During this concert, four string players from county public schools will sit in with the orchestra for portions of the concert; also, a student writer is doing the concert program notes. And where a private school is concerned, students from St. John's Parish Day School will perform in a pre-concert program.
As for the program itself, it thematically deals with various kinds of creative partnerships.
The pioneering African-American composer William Grant Still (1895- 1978), for instance, is represented by a composition, “Mother and Child,” that was inspired by a painting by Sargent Claude Johnson.
A prolific composer, Still wrote five symphonies, eight operas and around 150 additional works. His operas include the 1938 “The Troubled Island,” featuring a libretto by Langston Hughes.
From the late 1910s through the 1930s, Still worked as an arranger for band leaders W.C. Handy, Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw; he also was an arranger for Hollywood movies including “Pennies from Heaven” (1936) and “Lost Horizon” (1937). He's a composer who deserves to be better known.
A composer who's definitely well known, Mozart is represented by his Clarinet Concerto in A major K. 622. It will be performed by Robert Patterson, acting principal clarinetist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
The compositional pairing that Mutchnik had in mind here is between Mozart (1756- 1791) and the specific late-18th-century clarinetist for whom he wrote this piece.
Speaking of late, this concerto was Mozart's last entirely instrumental work. He died two months after its premiere.
Another sort of farewell occurs in Haydn's so-called “Farewell” Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp minor. Haydn (1732-1809), who composed 106 symphonies, was hardly on the way out the door when he wrote this one.
Mutchnik's thematic pairing here involves the fact that this symphony was yet another example of Haydn's strong partnership with his financial patron, Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy.
Along with a group of musicians, Haydn had gone to the prince's Hungarian summer palace for what amounted to a rather long stay. The impatient musicians wanted to return home, so they appealed to Haydn to intervene with his patron. Haydn did so indirectly through the “Farewell” symphony.
That's because the final section of this symphony has the musicians in one-by-one fashion stop playing, blow out the music stand candles, and then exit the stage, leaving just two violins to bring the symphony to a very quiet conclusion. Esterhazy got the symbolic point, and these clearly non-union musicians were allowed to return home the day after the performance.
Mutchnik said there is yet another kind of pairing he contemplated while planning the upcoming concert.
“Another partnership has been with St. John's, where the Rev. Carol Pinkham Oak has been a big supporter of our concerts,” Mutchnik said. “This concert is in her honor as she retires. The least we could do is send her off with a nice concert.”
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
