Music Director Thierry Fischer and the Utah Symphony perform a program of music for strings at Abravanel Hall, September 17, 2020. Photo by Kathleen Sykes
“The Utah Symphony opened its 2020-21 season on time Thursday night, ending a six-month intermission,” writes Catherine Reese Newton in Saturday’s (9/19) Classical Review. “The Abravanel Hall stage was extended to allow at least 6 feet of distance between the night’s performers—about 40 string players … There was a similar buffer between audience members,” who wore masks and were limited in number. “Prolonged applause greeted music director Thierry Fischer, who saluted concertmaster Madeline Adkins with a fist bump as he took the stage. The traditional opening-night rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner carried more pathos than at any time since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Fela Sowande’s ‘Joyful Day’ [the first movement of the 1944 African Suite] opened the [one-hour] show in festive fashion…. Barber’s Adagio for Strings … was sensitively shaped…. The short evening’s major work, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings felt like the embodiment of cautious optimism…. ‘You simply cannot imagine how happy we are to be here tonight,’ the masked but clearly emotional Fischer said.” The evening concluded with a video of the orchestra performing Augusta Read Thomas’s Fanfare of Hope and Solidarity, which it had commissioned during the pandemic, as “a touching and bittersweet closer.”
