The Charlotte Observer

March 6, 1996

Western Piedmont Symphony shows that it’s finally come into its own

by Elizabeth Bruton

Finally - and wonderfully - the Western Piedmont Symphony has found its voice.

Thursday’s Masterworks Concert, titled “Saxophone Sweet,” signaled its arrival as a symphony with an identity, a sound that is its own, with its own strengths and weaknesses, but most definitely its own feel for music.

The symphony has always had a peculiar talent for the modern, the atonal, arrhythmic, moody pieces of the most avant-garde composers, and always the symphony has played the classics with style and grace. But this time, its performance brought a maturity and assurance, the knowledge of who it is and how it feels about the music.

William Walton’s “Suite from The Wise Virgins,” which borrows several themes from Bach, and Robert Schumann’s “Symphony #3 in E-flat major” (the “Rhenish Symphony”), which were the opening and closing works of the concert, brought home the purity of the strings.

Thursday also brought the delightful, quirky New Century Saxophone Quartet, featured in the middle of the concert. The ultranouveau “Quartet Concerto for Saxophones and Orchestra” was certainly not bedtime music by any means, but created a real showcase for the modern.

These four musicians - Michael Stephenson on soprano sax, James Boatman on alto, Stephen Pollock on tenor, and Brad Hubbard on baritone - have a real feel for each other, cueing off each others’ moods and rhythms, creating music in which they are the center.

The orchestra’s accompaniment showed its versatility and appreciation of the idiom, performed close to flawlessly. At the close of the formally announced work, the quartet and orchestra took off on a musical romp for an encore.

The first piece, Russell Peck’s “Drastic Measures” turns out to be a tour of U.S. musical history, touching down every few measures in a different time and place, from New Orleans and Bourbon Street to the romantic to ragtime. There were lyric moments, the big band sound and the ’50s rock ’n’ roll.

In some ways, an old favorite or a classical selection is easy - people hear what they want to - but in other ways the familiar is incredibly daring because the orchestra must establish its own voice to be measured against the other great orchestras.

This was the evening the symphony arrived.