Beautiful music playing in Brockton
In its first year under new music director James Orent, the Brockton Symphony Orchestra is drawing new audiences and making new friends, according to backers.
The orchestra performs its third concert of the 2007-08 season on Feb. 9 featuring music by Mozart and Mendelssohn.
Orent, the backup conductor for the Boston Pops, was hired to revive Brockton’s community orchestra and help build an audience for an orchestra with a long history of local service but, more recently, a crisis in direction.
“Classical music is a tough sell in Brockton,” said Paul Carchidi, chairman of the Brockton Symphony’s board of trustees. But following Orent’s hiring last summer, Carchidi said, “There’s an amazing resurgence of interest in the community.”
Concert attendance is up, family groups are among the new faces in the audience, and new members are joining the orchestra’s board.
The orchestra is also reaching out to other community organizations such as the Brockton-based Metro South Chamber of Commerce to build support, Carchidi said.
Next month’s concert places the spotlight on two talented string players, violinist Kristina Nilsson, the Brockton orchestra’s concert mistress, and guest soloist violist Yumi Sagiuchi, who joins Nilsson in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra. Orent sees the piece as one of the rarely heard masterpieces often overlooked by larger orchestras, but kept alive by community orchestras such as the Brockton Symphony.
Nilsson, the Brockton orchestra’s first violin, has played regularly in the first violin sections of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra and the Boston Ballet orchestra for over 20 years.
She has performed as soloist with both ensembles, including taking the virtuoso violin part on Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending.” Among the other regional orchestras she plays for is the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, which she helped to found.
A graduate student at Boston’s New England Conservatory, Sagiuchi is the principal player on viola for the Boston Civic Orchestra and New England Conservatory’s own Philharmonia Orchestra.
Regarded as an experimental genre in the 1770s when Mozart wrote it, the Sinfonia Concertante has been praised as one of his finest and most original concertos.
The orchestra will also play a shorter Mozart piece, the march movement of the “Haffner Serenade.” Commissioned by the Haffner family, one of Mozart’s patrons, for a 1776 family wedding, the piece was wildly popular at the time and remains a favorite.
Also on the program is one of the most popular symphonies of a 19th-century romantic giant, Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, known as the “Scottish Symphony.” The work was begun during the composer’s trip to Scotland in 1829, and its second movement is based on a piece of Scottish folk music. The symphony offers opportunities for woods and horns to shine along with the strings.
The Brockton Symphony, which relies on serious amateur musicians buttressed by a few professionals and a loyal local base of support, has grown under Orent’s leadership, Carchidi said.
“The musicians love him,” he said. “He has the greatest personality and methods for working with people that I have ever experienced.”
In addition to a new director, the orchestra is keeping new hours this year, presenting concerts on Saturday evenings rather than Sunday afternoons. This change is intended to draw an audience looking for a good way to spend a night out, Carchidi said.
The orchestra has also had to do without its regular venue, the Brockton War Memorial Building, unavailable this year because of renovations needed to improve access. The orchestra is performing at West Junior High School, 271 West St. The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. For ticket information, call the box office at 508-588-3841.
Robert Knox can be contacted at rc.knox@gmail.com.
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