The Kettle Moraine Symphony, Moraine Chorus, West Bend High School “Vivace!” Choir and Concert Choir—all under the baton of the orchestra’s new music director, Richard Hynson—honored America’s veterans in a concert on Sunday, Nov. 19, at the Silver Lining Arts Center. The program included some fine music and, for the most part, the combined musical forces took them on with decent playing and obvious enthusiasm. That said, however, frequent intonation problems—primarily in the brass section—somewhat marred the overall impact.
Things took a rough turn in Howard Hanson’s lovely Romantic Symphony (No. 2) of 1930. Hanson is my favorite American composer, and this is my favorite work of this acclaimed director (for 40 years) of the Eastman School of Music. I’d never heard the work in concert before and was looking forward to experiencing it for the first time in live performance. The symphony is string-heavy (gorgeously so), and no qualms there in this performance, but brass solos here and there were somewhat grating; it also concluded with a less-than-riveting finale—a final tutti striking too hesitantly and too dismissively.
For a concert with numerous brass instrument solos—in works such as John Williams’ Hymn to the Fallen (from his 1998 score to Saving Private Ryan) and the Largo (slow movement) from Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (No. 9)—the inability of certain players to properly hit their notes and maintain them was, at times, rather jarring to the sensitive listener. The combined choral forces, however, harmonized beautifully in the moving, soaring moments of the Williams piece.
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Other works of a jauntier nature—Morton Gould’s American Salute, John Philip Sousa’s Washington Post and Stars and Stripes Forever marches and Richard Rodgers’ and Robert Russell Bennett’s Victory at Sea suite—came off somewhat better; herein, kudos most of all to the orchestra’s four percussionists (Robert Koszewski, Eric Christie, Daniel Hafenstein and Erik Holmes).
