Lush Sonics and Angst-Fueled Grandeur from the Greenwich Village Orchestra

It’s been a good season for edgy orchestras around town, and it was a particularly good evening for the Greenwich Village Orchestra this past Sunday, performing a program heavy on the late Romantics packed with twists and turns, and nuance, and thrills. They opened with Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ overture of sorts, The White Peacock, completed as an orchestral piece just a year before the American composer died at 35 in 1920. How such a lush, buoyant, attractively enveloping and quite cinematic tableau could have been inspired by such a horrible, florid poem (the program notes reproduced the text in full) is hard to fathom. The orchestra either said the hell with the poem or never paid any mind, letting emotion fly free before reining it back in with the Schumann Cello Concerto. Soloist Brook Speltz played methodically and confidently, adding a robust quality that had him breaking a sweat before the first movement was over (it may have been seasonably cold outside, but it was comfortably toasty in the auditorium). The orchestra matched his steady, commanding presence as conductor Barbara Yahr led them through the contrasting tempo shifts, matter-of-fact exchanges of voices and sudden gusts with an aptly Teutonic aplomb.

All that seemed like an afterthought in light of the showstopper they made out of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 1. Yahr reminded the crowd that although Sibelius is known for vast, sweeping vistas, and picturesque panoramics, the portait this symphony paints is an interior one, uneasy to extremes. Verging on manic depression would be another way to put it. Gary Dranch‘s clarinet, plaintive and searching, opened it and provided calmly chilling moments throughout, as the ensemble pounced and swept their way through racing flurries of strings and eventually a mad dash upward as the opening movement hit one of its many peaks.

Apprehension recurs constantly in this symphony, and the orchestra seized every opportunity to keep the tension at redline, whether when building a brooding lustre with dancing strings overhead, or when a delicate Joy Plaisted harp solo set off volleys of brass, or switching in a split-second from a sarcastic fanfare to shivery pulses of winds. All of the back-and-forth dynamics could only be described as mood swings. What inner demons was the composer exorcising?

Next on the bill for the GVO is their annual family concert, an East Village institution which features favorites like Tubby the Tuba and the famous “instrument petting zoo” afterward where kids can get friendly with a violin, or the timpani, or whatever they might find intriguing. It’s at 3 PM on Sunday, Dec 7; suggestion donation is $20/$10/srs and kids get in free, reception to follow.

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