Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 13, 1993 TAG: 9309140099
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Calm down - the RSO and Adolphus Hailstork have a user- friendly piano concerto for you.
"Call it user-friendly, or you could say it's `listener-friendly' if you want," said Hailstork. "They'll be amazed at how conservative it is - it's my Romantic Concerto in A minor."
However it's described, the Virginia Beach composer's piece is the big new work on tonight's season opener from the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra at the Roanoke Civic Center. If it lives up to its advance billing, it stands a chance to be a hit in Roanoke, where audiences tend to have mainstream tastes.
RSO Music Director and conductor Victoria Bond, reaching for comparisons, comes up with familiar names when asked to describe the concerto.
"It's a very romantic piece. I would say that it continues a line of traditional romantic piano concertos such as Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky and Chopin and Ravel.
"It's very virtuosic, and it was written especially for Leon Bates," said Bond. The New York City pianist will give the work its Roanoke premiere tonight.
"It's a difficult piece, it has a lot of technical intricacies, a lot of tricky meter changes, and there's some lovely cantabile singing passages for the piano in the second movement," said Bond.
The 52-year-old composer has taught at Norfolk State University since 1977. Born in Rochester, N.Y., Hailstork began violin lessons at age 4 and went on to be a chorister and occasional organist at the Episcopal Cathedral of All Saints in Albany. He cites the Anglican choral tradition as a major influence on his early musical development.
Hailstork went on to study with some big names in the musical world. Names like the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who has nursed some of the century's greatest composers. Names like H. Owen Reed at Michigan State University and Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music.
But Hailstork said his most fruitful study took place under the distinguished American composer David Diamond, whose own music has been undergoing a revival in recent years, spearheaded by Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz.
"What I appreciated the most about Diamond was that he freed the student up to investigate himself. Diamond did not preach an `ism.'
"It was a `why not?' philosophy. I would find myself restricting myself and putting myself in a box because previous academic teachers had said `thou shalt' and `thou shalt not,' and Diamond came along and said, `Why not?' "
Possibly as a result of Diamond's liberating influence, Adolphus Hailstork today considers himself a follower of no compositional school. Instead, he sees himself as "picking up the thread of Americana that got interrupted by World War II and the influx of the Europeans who made all the Americans start genuflecting as soon as they got here. It's the main line of Copland and Barber, people like that."
Instead of joining a school, Hailstork says he's created his own.
`I created what I call `authenticism,' and it's my own little private school. It's a full integration of the self in acknowledging that I have a mind and a body and a set of emotions - I respond to my own viscera and my own thoughts and emotions."
Hailstork says that composers today are divided into two camps. The generally older academic mandarins are known for writing spiky and distinctly "non-user-friendly" music, while a younger generation of "populists" is more interesting in gaining an audience with accessible works.
"It boils down to the traditional uptown/downtown division in New York City, and the older ones don't want the populists to get played," said Hailstork.
"I'm especially intrigued by a new report of the American Symphony Orchestra League which advocates inclusiveness in symphony programming. As more women and minorities get a chance to get on the podium there's gonna be an opening up of the repertoire, a refreshing of the repertoire."
Tonight's piano concerto was midwifed through a relatively new wrinkle on the business side of classical music: a group commission. The piece was jointly paid for by a consortium of five orchestras, including the Virginia Symphony in Richmond and orchestras in Louisville and Phoenix in addition to the RSO. The work was premiered last year in Virginia Beach by Leon Bates and the Virginia Symphony.
Victoria Bond calls consortium commissioning "a wonderful idea."
"You get the same kind of pooling of resources that's behind the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra and the Roanoke Valley Choral Society merging - the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The PR possibilities are good, too, because every time the piece gets played, your orchestra's name is mentioned."
Bond says that she is currently producing a piece for a consortium of orchestras - one of which is the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra - which will be premiered in October, 1994.
Filling out tonight's program are two major-league audience favorites, a suite from Igor Stravinsky's ballet score to "The Firebird," and Ottorino Respighi's "The Pines of Rome."
"The Firebird" is based on the Russian folktale in which the benevolent and magical Firebird helps the young Prince Ivan outwit the evil King Kastchei. A product of Stravinsky's earliest creative period, the piece is crowded with memorable melodies presented in a lush, late-Romantic manner.
"The Pines of Rome" is the middle tone poem of the so-called "Roman" triptych of the Italian composer Respighi. Though some critics disdainfully accused him of writing "movie music," Respighi was an acknowledged master of orchestral color who had at his disposal possibly the brightest orchestral palette of any 20th-century composer.
RSO officials say both season tickets and tickets for tonight's season opener are still available. The season's concerts will again be broadcast live by public radio station WVTF (89.1 FM).
The Roanoke Symphony Orchestra kicks off its 40th anniversary subscription series tonight at 8 at the Roanoke Civic Center auditorium. 343-9127.
by CNB