“Wind and brass were major players in the Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s 2020-21 season finale last Friday night in a pre-recorded concert at the Collins Center for the Arts,” led by Music Director Lucas Richman, writes Marcia Gronewold Sly in Saturday’s (6/26) Ellsworth American (Maine). The concert, streamed at the orchestra’s website, “opened with African-American composer Adolphus Hailstork’s ‘An American Fanfare.’ … A traditional and yet all-American fanfare infused with hints of jazz, Hailstork’s fanfare was an especially fitting introduction since it was released on the eve of the first national Juneteenth holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States.… The concert’s centerpiece was Kurt Weill’s ‘Kleine Dreigroschenmusik,’ a suite of eight movements based on music from ‘The Threepenny Opera.’ The suite calls for an enlarged version of the pit band for the opera…. Standouts among the solos were played by trombonist Michael Tybursky and clarinetist Karen Beacham. The suite is full of slightly off-kilter rhythms and melodies, dissonances and surprise endings that echo the collective experience of the past year-plus.” Also on the program were Beethoven’s Military March in C Major (“Zapfenstreich”), Gounod’s Petite Symphonie in B-Flat for Wind Instruments, and Kathryn Bostic’s Portrait of a Peaceful Writer.
Change font size
