Orchestra gives full-length spring concert

The Middlebury College Orchestra gave its first full concert under the conductor Andrew Massey on Thursday, March 11.

This year was a transitional period for the orchestra, as Troy Peters, who had conducted the College orchestra since 2005, left Middlebury last year to be the music director for the youth orchestras of San Antonio.

Massey, whose musical career highlights include serving as assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the New Orleans Symphony, is rather new to working with unprofessional orchestras such as Middlebury’s.

The fall semester’s orchestra concert was canceled, but the orchestra gave a short Winter Term concert, performing Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.

Last Thursday night’s program consisted of Rossini’s overture, “The Italian Girl in Algiers,” Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K.466 and Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 in F major, Op. 90. Rossini’s overture, brought alive with melody lines by the oboist Jean Falconer ’10, was full of theatrical wit and charm and served as a great opener to the concert.

It was a valiant attempt by the Middlebury College Orchestra to perform Brahms’ Symphony No. 3, given the difficulty of the symphony and the short time frame they had to put it together. “The concert represented the vitality of a group of individuals coming together through the joy of music-making,” Noah Silverstein ’11 said.

The spring semester concert traditionally includes a concerto with a student soloist, a tradition that continued this year under the new conductor. Richard Chen ’13, who already made an impression by performing Chopin’s untouchable Ballade No. 4 at Diana Fanning’s students recital in the fall semester, was the winner of this year’s Alan and Joyce Beucher Concerto Competition.

In addition to being featured as a soloist with the College orchestra, his name is engraved along with previous winners on the gold plaque outside of the music library in the Mahaney Center for the Arts.

The auditions were held in January with four professional musicians and judges, including Massey. By unanimous decision, Chen was selected as the winner.

Precise, expressive and light, his playing was suitable for Mozart and demonstrated mature piano skills that he’s honed since he was four. It is said that Mozart is too hard for adults to play and too easy for children to play; the simplicity of the music may at first appear to be easy, but mistakes made with Mozart are bare to the audience as absolute precision and clarity are critical to playing Mozart.

Playing one of the most well-known works by Mozart, Chen was even at a higher risk of exposing his mistakes to the audience. However, right from his entry with the expressive right-hand melody, he engaged the audience and amazed with his crystal clear playing.

Since Mozart’s D minor piano concerto has been so popular, many famous composers, such as Brahms, Busoni and Clara Schumann, wrote cadenzas for it.

Chen performed the most commonly played cadenza written by Beethoven, executing it marvelously at a professional level. His performance of the famous Mozart concerto was simply exquisite: tone, precision, technical mastery and the palpable emotional connection he had with the piece were all present. Since Richard is only a first-year, the Middlebury community will have the joy of hearing many more great performances by him.