By Kira Ricarte
Backstage, the orchestra was warming up.
Sitting in the seats of the Don Buckwald Theater, audience members heard the sounds of jovial chatter, laughter, and violins playing snippets of Vivaldi and Mozart from behind the stage as the orchestra players prepared for their first night of performance in the spring semester.
Minutes later, the musicians themselves would emerge from the wings onto their seats onstage, where they would continue their warmups, playing dissonant sounds as they got their instruments ready at performance level. Danielle Hanna, one of the two flutists performing in the Conservatory Orchestra and a sophomore at BC, shared her insights into the process.
In a Zoom interview with The Vanguard, she discussed what it was like learning the orchestral pieces by composers Gabriel Fauré and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for the performance night, including both its joys and its challenges.
“Anytime we do a concert,” Hanna told The Vanguard, “it’s very stressful, but it’s also very rewarding because we put so much work in, both in the practice room and in the rehearsal room […].”
For her, the work, which included her practice sessions after classes and late evening orchestra rehearsals, was mainly her “trying to lock in with everyone.” As a member of the orchestra, Hanna had to keep in mind her intonation, pitch, volume, and entrances alongside, “hammering out the more technical passages with the metronome.”
As the musicians had been warming up for some time, soloists violinist Samuel Andonian and violinist Martine Thomas, joined the orchestra onstage. The musicians drummed their feet on the floor in the form of roaring applause. Both of these soloists are highly experienced and talented players, as well as graduate students and teachers at the Conservatory of Music at BC.
According to their artist bios in the Conservatory’s playbill handed out to each audience member, Massachusetts native Andonian has been a soloist for other orchestras such as the Boston Youth Symphony and the New England Philharmonic, and has been a concertmaster for the New York Classical Players. Thomas, meanwhile, was a soloist and chamber musician with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, and has performed internationally in places such as the Berlin Philharmonie, BBC Proms, Mariinsky Theatre, and Carnegie Hall.
“I mean, as an orchestra,” Hanna said, referencing the soloists, “I think we look up to them because they’re grad students, and […] amazing performers, and I think we all try to […] kind of capture the way they perform.”
Conductor George Rothman entered the stage, and after a brief introduction, the orchestra finally began to play the first piece of the night: Faure’s Suite, Op. 112, “Masques et Bergamasques.” The piece had its first debut in 1919 as a comédie musicale inspired by Verlaine’s poem, “Claire de lune”, which described people donning masks to entertain themselves, yet seeming sad under their fanciful disguises.
The music filled the theatre, with the players’ bows moving briskly yet blithely across their stringed instruments while the woodwinds harmonized in the background. All of this was under George Rothman’s subtle conducting style, which often looked like he was adding something small here and there in the music’s creation that ended up making a huge impact in the way it was played.
The tone of Faure’s music varied by movement. It went from charming and enchanting, to lively, yet stately. Especially so in the third movement, which is called a “gavotte” after the French folk dance of that name which, by the time the piece was composed, became popular in European courts. The third movement brought to mind a queen entering a royal hall with its dynamic strings.
The fourth and final movement of Faure’s suite was a “pastorale”: music with themes associated with the countryside. While Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, made a century earlier, is sensory, bright, and deeply romantic, Faure’s “pastorale” movement is light and cheerful, with the quick, whimsical notes of the flute reminding one of frolicking lambs in the green fields.
Hanna, who performed in Faure’s suite as one of the flautists, considered it her favorite in the orchestra, saying that she, “[…] naturally gravitated towards the Fauré [as a] very big fan of 20th century French music.” And while it was pleasant to listen to, it was the opening act and in Rothman’s words, the “accompanying piece” to the true star of the show: Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante in E-Flat Major, K.364.
During the performance of “Masques et Bergamasques,” soloists Andonian and Thomas were just two musicians playing in the midst of the orchestra; their music flowed alongside everyone else’s.
However, for Mozart’s symphony, they were the main characters, standing in front of the orchestra just off to the side of the conductor. There, they played their instruments in a way that transformed their music into almost human voices with their own personalities. Andonian’s violin performance is jaunty, fanciful, and verbose. Thomas’s viola performance, in contrast, seemed more grounded and level-headed, accompanied with some dry wit. And yet, when their music both melded and played the same melodies, it was the most harmonious part of the symphony.
Together, they made a very fascinating show to watch, with the orchestra in the background laying the emotional groundwork for the two solo performances to truly glow that night.
There was also a brilliant shift in energy in Mozart’s symphony that wasn’t present in Faure’s suite, which makes sense given the contexts behind each of the pieces performed that night, provided by the Conservatory’s playbill. Mozart’s music was breaking free from the standards set by his dignified courtly patrons of the time, and one could feel this sense of rebellion throughout his pieces.
Overall, the Conservatory Orchestra’s performances of Faure and Mozart were delightful, warm, imaginative, and at times, deeply lulling.
“It’s like something so rewarding that it’s kind of hard to put into words,” Hanna told The Vanguard. “The feeling of just, like, gratitude and pure happiness, just being in that environment and hearing your work pay off, for people.”
Students interested in upcoming performances from the BC Conservatory of Music can view them on their Instagram: @bcmusic.nyc