I went to the performance of the Guelph Symphony Orchestra titled “American Rhapsody.” This is the first time I’ve seen this orchestra.<\/p>\n
I know and love all four pieces they played — Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and “Hoe-Down,” George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.”<\/p>\n
“Hoe-Down” is part of the\u00a0larger work\u00a0“Rodeo.” “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story” is Bernstein’s re-imagining of his music from the musical — without any singing. The orchestra gets to do some things they don’t usually do in the latter — they snap their fingers and yell “Mambo!”<\/p>\n
When you go to a live performance you can hear details that you don’t get from a CD — you can also hear a slightly different interpretation of the music. There’s also an energy from the performers.<\/p>\n
Overall the concert was highly enjoyable. I found in a small number of spots that an instrument was standing out a bit more than perhaps it should.<\/p>\n
I like the conductor, Judith Yan, a lot — she has what I would call a straightforward conducting style. She spoke in between the first two pieces and she’s very funny.<\/p>\n
The piano soloist for “Rhapsody in Blue” was Amy Di Nino. She wasn’t unnecessarily flamboyant like some piano soloists — she just played well.<\/p>\n
For “Hoe-Down” the orchestra was joined by the Guelph Symphony Youth Orchestra. With the two groups together there were close to 100 performers.<\/p>\n
If you are going to a concert and you’re going to talk to the person next to you during it, don’t — stay home.<\/p>\n
I will undoubtedly attend more GSO concerts in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to the performance of the Guelph Symphony Orchestra titled “American Rhapsody.” This is the first time I’ve seen this orchestra. I know and love all four pieces they played — Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and “Hoe-Down,” George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.” “Hoe-Down” is part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[91,13,5],"class_list":["post-2389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-of-music","tag-classical","tag-music","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2389"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2489,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389\/revisions\/2489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}