Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra

Late Summer Capriccio

Todays Zaman

Arts & Culture May 29, 2010

Toshiyuki Shimada says it’s an honor to perform at Aya İrini

Coming together for the first time in Turkey on Thursday, the prominent Turkish classical pianist İdil Biret and the Yale Symphony Orchestra (YSO) performed at the Aya İrini Museum as part of the 2010 Yale Week organized in several locations across Turkey by Yale University.

The YSO, following Thursday’s concert, set out on a mini tour of Turkey, with more concerts on their itinerary. On Sunday the YSO is playing at the Bilkent Concert Hall in Ankara and on June 2 at the Ahmed Adnan Saygun Art Center in İzmir, presenting a repertoire that ranges from Turkish composers such as Ferit Tüzün to the greatest composers of all time, such as Chopin.

“This program is very special for both Yale University and for the Turkish people,” said Toshiyuki Shimada, the conductor of the orchestra, in an interview with Today’s Zaman. “There are certain connections that are significant to this program. First of all we’re bringing [the music of] Leonard Bernstein, and he has a strong tie with Yale University. We have performed many of his pieces, and he had visited the Yale campus. One of the former conductors was a student of Bernstein.”

The orchestra performed Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto for the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth and also played a composition by Turkish composer Ferit Tüzün, called “Esintiler” (Breezes), for the first time. “It’s a very famous piece, and it seems that every orchestra coming here likes to perform this piece. After starting to rehearse it, we felt that we can reflect some of the wonderful flavor of Turkish music in there, the energy of the Turkish people in this music. It was great for our orchestra to perform that piece, too, to be proud that we can perform Turkish music. It might not be in an authentic way, but it’s our own way.”

Shimada also expressed the orchestra’s pleasure in performing with internationally renowned Turkish pianist İdil Biret. “We are delighted that İdil Biret will be with us,” says Shimada. “I think it’s very important to perform with musicians from the country that you visit. It’s very fortunate and we’re honored to perform with her.” “And it is a great honor to play in such a historic place as Aya İrini; the students are very excited,” adds Shimada. “All this Turkish history is fantastic,” says Shimada. “I’ve only read about it in books, and places like Ayasofya, I’ve looked at their pictures for so many years but now I’m here and to perform next to Ayasofya in Aya İrini is unbelievable!”

The origin of their Turkish adventure is rather interesting. “The flutist in our orchestra, her roommate is Turkish and is related to the rector of Boğaziçi University,” explained Shimada. “Originally, there was just talk that it would be great if we could go to Turkey, but then our flutist said her roommate’s mother was related to the rector of Boğaziçi University. So that’s where the spring came from, and it’s getting bigger and bigger.”
The orchestra was originally only going to play in İstanbul and İzmir, but the project was expanded to Ankara later on. “Someone said we should go to Ankara, and so we’re going to perform in Ankara, too,” he exclaimed. “This couldn’t have happened without the generosity of the universities.”

Shimada and his orchestra still have other plans to be realized in Turkey in the coming years. “One of the things we wanted to do here which didn’t happen is to hold youth concerts in some schools here for the schoolchildren,” says Shimada. “We wanted to do it, but maybe the next time. I hope to come back, I really do hope so.”

Like another family The Yale Symphony is composed of undergraduate students, not necessarily music students; there are only a few of them who are music students, the others are biology majors, history majors, chemistry majors. There are similar orchestras in other universities such as Princeton and Harvard.

Shimada expressed confidence in his orchestra. “I think we’re one of the top among the undergraduate university orchestras; I’m proud to say that.”

The diversity of students forming the orchestra also attracts attention. “There are a lot of students with an Asian background in the orchestra,” notes Shimada and exclaims, “Well, I’m of Asian origin. There are a lot of Chinese origin, regular Americans. ... We used to have European students but not this year. There are some from Canada, from New Zealand.”

In spite of such cultural diversity, Shimada explains that they are trying to achieve the same target as an entity. “They were brought up in different cultures and they get together,” he said. “But the ultimate goal of a symphony orchestra is to play in unison with one sound. So everybody’s effort is to contribute, to get united. That’s an interesting point because everybody is from a different background, yet we’re trying to perform in the same way.”

As the students graduate from the university, they have to leave the orchestra behind, which is sometimes hard for the rest. “Unfortunately, we always lose some key players around this time and with this orchestra we’ll be losing around 10; this is their last concert. After they leave, they do their own things. Maybe some day I will create an alumni orchestra,” says Shimada.

Shimada’s orchestra benefitted from the conductor’s energy when he took over. “Every conductor brings a different type of energy to the orchestra,” explains Shimada. “We’re all different after all. ... Bringing a new direction, new ideas, new focus, new energy -- it automatically raises the whole group to a higher level, not meaning that I’m necessarily better than the former conductors. I’ve been with Yale University for almost five years, but I’m so excited about this orchestra because they’ve got so much energy and motivation to perform. These students don’t get any school credit, they play in the orchestra just for the joy of it. It’s not mandatory to do this, but they’re committed to participating in this orchestra, and the rehearsals are six hours a week. At concert time we rehearse for 12 hours a week even though they have to study for their chemistry tests, and all those very tough things at the university.”

Of course, it is not always that easy to control such a young group among whom there are 18-year-olds. “They’re so young!” exclaims Shimada laughing. “I’ve to stop them, like galloping horses, there’s so much energy in this orchestra.” Shimada pursues his professional activities as well. “I also have a professional orchestra,” he says. “I have two different worlds, and I’m very fortunate.” However, there are certain differences between conducting a professional orchestra and a youth orchestra. “Ultimately the goal is the same,” says Shimada. “But the young orchestra takes a lot more time to get to the end point. In the professional orchestra we just perform four days before the concert. But with this orchestra we need at least three weeks to get ready for a concert.”

Nevertheless, the students mean more than an orchestra to Shimada. “I have a son of my own, but they are like my own children, another family,” he says.

29 May 2010, Saturday
HATİCE AHSEN UTKU İSTANBUL

Article published May 18, 2010

Peers name Winters Music Educator of the Year

Waterford - The Connecticut Music Educators have awarded Joan Winters the Middle School Music Educator of the Year Award.

Winters, the orchestra director in Waterford at Clark Lane Middle School and Waterford High School, received the award at a special ceremony in Hartford during the recent CMEA annual in-service conference. The award culminates her contributions to orchestra music education in Connecticut over the last 25 years.

In March 2010, she directed the CMEA Southern Region Middle School Music Festival Orchestra, and in 2008 was one of only six educators nationwide to be awarded the Heifetz International Music Institute Pedagogy Fellowship.

Winters currently serves on the board of the American String Teachers Association, and is also the musical director and conductor of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Youth Orchestra in Waterford. She resides in East Lyme with her husband Shane and children Chris and Jessica.

Article published Apr 18, 2010

Under a new conductor, an orchestra is renewed

Milton Moore

The transformation of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra under new Music Director Toshi Shimada couldn't be more dramatic. Or perhaps we should say, less dramatic.

Drama is not Shimada's forte. Under his leadership, the ECSO concerts go as they should. When you are playing the music of Mozart or Ravel or Copland, it should go very well - and it has.

The six-concert season that ended this month seemed an encore to Shimada's stellar try-out concert in 2008 during the music director play-offs that saw five finalists compete for the position. As in that first concert, Shimada's hallmarks have been a fine sensitivity to the details of a score without sacrificing its overall sweep, an ability to draw out the virtuosity of the orchestra's talented principals and a canny survival guide for The Garde Arts Center's acoustic desert.

The Yale University professor, with a track record of leading orchestras this size, replaced Xiao-Lu Li, who had led the orchestra for nine seasons. Most conductor/orchestra marriages go through a seven-year itch, and nine seasons is a long haul. The time was ripe for a growth spurt, though improvement isn't always a given.

But the quality of this orchestra this season was at times startling. We had all heard the violin section improve during Li's tenure, but the suddenness of the transformation of the whole under Shimada couldn't have been imagined. In December, I returned from a couple orchestra concerts in New York, including the New York Philharmonic, to hear the ECSO play Haydn's "London" Symphony and was shocked by how fine it was in comparison. More remarkably, I heard Peter Serkin perform the same Brahms piano concerto in Carnegie Hall that he performed here with Shimada; without a doubt, the performance here was better. How can this orchestra change so quickly?

One obvious difference in the ECSO under Shimada and Li is the conductors' approaches to the Garde's arid acoustic. Li's solution was to turn up the volume. His range of dynamics seemed to begin somewhere around mezzo forte and rise from there, and anyone not accustomed to his conducting might have thought he had some odd palsy in his left hand, which constantly twitched toward the violin section to urge them to be louder and louder still.

Shimada uses the acoustic to his advantage. The lack of rich low tones and warmth in the hall tends to highlight the orchestra's brighter voices in the winds and brass section. Shimada has used this to paint a striking clarity in the orchestra's sonic presence. Sectional play by the strings does not bury the brighter voices, and Shimada uses this transparency wisely. Much of this can be attributed to his acumen at the podium, but much is the wisdom of his programming.

Li's taste in musical fare pretty much went from the early Romatics to late Romantics, with all the Romantics in between (who can forget his Rachmaninoff- Rachmaninoff-Tchaikovsky concert?). This musical era of massed strings and big gestures fit his search for sonic heft, and the audience learned the equation: volume + volume = bombast. Li's one-dimensional programming brought a dreary sameness to ECSO concerts.

Shimada's musical selections have been more varied in his first season than perhaps the entire decade of the Nineties for the ECSO. He has brought back the neglected Classical era, with wonderful performances of Mozart and Haydn that employed a small orchestra and succeeded with wit and energy and phrasing. He put a good deal of post-Romantic 20th century music on the stage, including Bernstein, Copland, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Poulenc and Ravel. He quickly won the trust of his audience, and there was little fidgeting when he presented new music (though his choices have been, wisely enough, short pieces).

And more importantly, he's won the trust of orchestra members. He shows up for rehearsal with his head in the game, and the musicians reciprocate. In concert, he's there when they need him.

Though Shimada showed his mettle with the big Romantic pot-boilers, such as his Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony, his finest moments have been some of the most intimate stretches of a score. During the slow movement of the spare Schumann Cello Concerto, the effect was so spellbinding, I had to remind myself to breathe.

Shimada exudes an easy-going warmth, both from the podium and in person, and he's appears utterly comfortable in the spotlight. His close proximity as a resident of the New Haven area
(Li lived in Louisiana) has helped him become a familiar face here, as he's made frequent outreaches to civic groups and schools and often gives the pre-concert lectures. He displays none of a maestro's aloofness and reinforces his regular-guy persona with his avid love of baseball, a passion on display in the ECSO window, where a poster-sized photo captures Shimada, in his conductor's tails, throwing out the first ball at an Astros game.

He's an online guy, his Blackberry always at the ready, and since his arrival, the ECSO has started a Facebook page, which has included links to YouTube clips of music scheduled for coming concerts.

The orchestra is the 800-pound gorilla in any arts community. It gets the big stage on Saturday nights, and as former ECSO leader Paul Phillips once noted, if you assess the years of study and apprenticeship represented by the musicians, it's like having 80 surgeons on stage. The orchestra is a huge community and personal commitment of time and money to the art form.
You wouldn't want to hand over a treasure like this to just anyone. Looking back across the ECSO season, it certainly seems like the orchestra is in good hands.

Article published Apr 12, 2010

Review: ECSO finishes season in grand manner

By Milton Moore Day Staff Writer

New London - The annual Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra choral concert usually tests the carrying capacity of the Garde Arts Center stage. Just how many people can it hold?

Saturday's grand finale to the ECSO season packed the stage with more than 160 singers and musicians, with bass principal Tom Green all but teetering into the audience and one percussionist stationed out a doorway. Music Director Toshi Shimada led a triumphant conclusion to his first season here in a mostly French program, with works great and small, but a performance that was uniformly first-rate.

The two featured choral works were contrasts in themselves: Poulenc's lean and characteristically unsanctimonious 1959 "Gloria" and Ravel's complex 1912 sonic tapestry "Daphnis et Chloe." Neither work featured the sort of part singing found in the bedrock German repertoire for large choruses, but in both works, the choristers were well-balanced and projected powerfully, even in the large orchestral crescendos.

Front and center for the Poulenc was soprano Mireille Asselin, a glamorous presence onstage in a strapless purple gown who charged her solos with emotion, personality and that ineffable quality that reaches across the lights to connect with her audience. In the two final sections, the "Domine Deus, Agnus Dei" and the "Qui sedes," her unforced timbre and heartfelt emotion were compelling.

The chorus was particularly pleasing in the tangy harmonies of the "Domine Deus," and Shimada kept the work light on its feet, particularly in the playful, scampering sections that harked back to Poulenc's Parisian nightlife evocations of the 1920s.

The concert opened with Dukas' short Fanfare to La Peri, with rich, warm playing by the brass and horns, then moved to Debussy's epochal "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune," the type of delicate, highly perishable score at which Shimada has excelled at since his try-out concert here.

The dreamlike Debussy, so shocking to its 1894 audience with its formlessness and dissonances, is a concert-hall staple today. Its opening theme in the flute, beautifully played by principal Nancy Chaput, is one of the signature melodies of the repertoire. (Chaput would take her bows once again for her animated evocation of Chloe's dance in the Ravel.) French orchestration often calls for a sonic transparency, allowing all of the subtle voices to be heard, and nowhere was this more beautifully drawn Saturday than in the closing moments of the Debussy, as the winds gently wafted like spring breezes over muted violins, in a gorgeous coloristic finish.

Shimada opened the second half with Mozart's Symphony No. 31, thematically included for its nickname "Paris" and programmatically included as a literal counterpoint to the French fare, all but devoid of Classical orchestral counterpoint. As in the Haydn symphony performed earlier this year, the small-sized period orchestra was tack sharp in ensemble, both brisk and robust.

The second movement, with the winds finishing thoughts for the strings, was beautiful without sweetness, and the final movement, with the first violins chasing the seconds in a game of counterpoint tag and its exciting stretto section, was a short, fast ride, thrilling without sonic fireworks.

The concert, and the season, ended with one of the most testing works in the orchestral repertoire, Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe." Shimada introduced the concert by saying "it has many, many, many, many notes." When speaking of the score by master orchestrator Ravel, the conductor said it has as many notes as in all of the other concerts this season combined. But the performance belied its difficulty, as Shimada led the chorus and huge orchestra - with two harps, a celeste and every wind instrument in the catalog - with a seemingly effortless grace.

The opening section, a pastoral evocation of murmuring waters, unfolded as naturally as spring, with the burbling waters drawn by the harps and winds and birdsongs from piccolo principal Cheryl Six setting the mood as the warm gently rising melodic sequence coalesced in the cellos and violas. When the wordless chorus entered and the strings swooned, the clear voicings, the virtuosity in the solo phrasing and the seamless melding of it all made you sense this is the best stuff an orchestra can do.

In the second section, with beautiful playing by the entire expanded flute section, the dance of winds and percussion surged toward the explosive finale, where Shimada used his laser-beam sense of direction to drive the 5/4 finale. The chorus rose to add full voice to the pulsing crescendos as the timpani and five percussionists raised the roof.

It was a big finish to a big season for the ECSO, and the mood surrounding this orchestra has never been sunnier.

Review: The good, the bad and
the wonderful at the ECSO

By Milton Moore Day Staff Writer

Article published March 15, 2010 New London -

The arc of progress, much like the arc of a composition's harmonic structure, is seldom an unbroken line. And so it went for the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra Saturday night, in a concert that contained some of the best elements of this orchestra's transition under new leadership - and some ghosts of demons past.

In concert in a storm-swept Garde Arts Center, Music Director Toshi Shimada wove some of the magic that has created such excitement from his presence here this season, especially in a luminous performance of the Schumann cello concerto, featuring soloist Ole Akahoshi.

But in the usually crowd-pleasing concert finale, Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, repeated ill-timed entrances and bad intonation from the horn section, a sore point in years past, dragged down far too many of the symphony's key moments. It is a rare concert indeed when a small-scale, intimate concerto such as Schumann's draws a stronger audience reaction than Beethoven's propulsive tour de force.

The program opened with Copland's beloved Appalachian Spring Suite, which Shimada took out with a characteristically quick tempo and attention to sonic detail. The poignant opening section, so spare and elegant, unfortunately layered the lilting voices of the orchestra wind and trumpet principals with a chorus of audience coughs.

Through the suite's middle sections, Shimada took a decidedly big-orchestra approach to this ballet suite originally written for just 13 instruments. The dances were forceful, reminiscent of the composer's western suites, with Shimada hopping in place to sharpen the accents. In the third section, the massed strings created a dark bloom straight from the Romantic era, and the famous "Simple Gifts" section, beautifully offered by clarinetist Kelli O'Connor, had to survive the dissenting voice from the horn section, before the hushed final pages, with flutist Nancy Chaput reprising the opening theme before Shimada sculpted an ethereal closing decrescendo.

The Schumann concerto that followed was one of Shimada's finest moments here. The balancing act between the projection of the cello, which cannot fill a hall as would a piano or violin, and the orchestral ensemble was deftly handled, aided by a resonating cello platform used by Akahoshi.

The performance was unhurried and intimate in this single-movement, cyclical work.
Akahoshi swayed in his seat through the lush lyrical passages and luxuriated in the warmth of the low registers. In the outer sections (the concerto has three conventional movements, but there is no pause between them) he was virtuosic in the rapid passagework, stops and dashing upward scales that ended with stabbing high cadences.

But it was the intimacy of the slow middle section, with its gentle message so fragile and exposed, that was the center of the evening. Here, Akahoshi and Shimada played a chamber music duet between stripped down orchestral forces and soloist. As Akahoshi closed his eyes and seemed to fall into a private reverie in Schumann's bittersweet lyricism in double stops, a gentle throb of pizzicato rose beneath him from the cello section. When the sound of cello principal Christine Coyle emerged from the section to join Akahoshi for a few measures of duet, the effect was spellbinding.

The concert ended with Beethoven's Seventh, which Shimada took at a fast pace, heightening the excitement and the dangers (don't the two go hand-in-hand?) of this wild rhythmic roller coaster ride. One of the more difficult Beethoven symphonies to play, as the sections wander off and coalesce around stunning rhythmic moments, the Seventh was drawn in high relief by Shimada, using wide dynamics to make the blaze-ups more eruptive.

But time and again, Beethoven highlights key moments with the horn section, and the section let Shimada down Saturday. As the coda of the first movement grows above massed bass strings groaning like tectonic plates, Beethoven scores the horns soaring above it all, and the effect of that dramatic moment was ruined. In the allegretto, one of Beethoven's most beloved movements, the theme and counter theme paced nicely to a delicate and lovely fugato, only to have it all come unglued by sloppy horn work.

Shimada pushed the final movement hard, conjuring a whirlwind as he stabbed his hands left and right to cue the rhythmic accents. But in the end, the parts affected the sum far too much.It's an odd concert when you walk out with the Schumann, not the Beethoven, stuck in your ear. And perhaps that's more of a tribute to one wonderful performance than a slight for another.

To view Toshi's new pictures, click here!

Our Spring Capriccio is here!

Review: Shimada knows the score with ECSO

By Milton Moore
Publication: The DayPublished 01/25/2010 12:00 AM Updated 01/25/2010 06:19 AM

New London- At the start of Saturday's Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra concert, the fourth under new Music Director Toshi Shimada, the conductor asked the audience at the Garde Arts Centerfor a mid-term grade.

In the audience's programs, Shimada said, there's a questionnaire, one that focused on audience response to his programming of music new to this audience. "I'm wondering what you're thinking," Shimada said.The crowd immediately replied with applause.

Shimada then proceeded to conduct a spirited and revelatory program of three works that spanned centuries and once again proved that he has lifted the orchestra to a new level. His conducting reveals the myriad voices in each work, a sonic transparency that never feels fussy, while retaining a keen sense of the overall shape and effect of long spans of composition.

In the evening's big sonic work, Stravinsky's 1947 Suite from "Petrouchka," it seemed that each principal in the orchestra was a star, as the mercurial orchestration spotlighted an obbligato for virtually every instrument amid its cross-cutting meters and rhythmic bustle. In the programmatic counterpoint to Stravinsky, Haydn's 1795 Symphony No. 104, the "London Symphony," Shimada led a pared-down, Classical-era sized ensemble in a beautifully phrased and paced performance that mined all the wit, tunefulness and pure pleasure Haydn offers.

Between these stylistic bookends, he used a smaller orchestra still - just 28 pieces - for Ibert's 1935 concerto for chamber orchestra and alto saxophone, the Concertino da Camera. The soloist in this very French, very Jazz Age work was ECSO Instrumental Composition Contest winner Stephen Charles Page Jr., who traversed its cascades of sixteenth notes and the sax's wide register, from its guttural basement to its upper oboe territory, with a playful ease. In the bluesy opening to the second movement, his honeyed tone and supple phrasing, with no apparent attack to any note, transformed the theater hall with a late-night jazz club spell.

The opening performance of the London Symphony, which Shimada called his "tribute to New London," basked in the charms of the Classical era, a period overlooked for nearly a decade by the former music director. The small orchestra - with just four cellos - was at its best, the string sections responding beautifully to Shimada's fine sense of phrasing. The andante slow movement was both delicate and rhythmically sharp - no small feat - and as the surprising modulations at its center dropped into an emotive minor, Shimada threw back his shoulders and spread his arms, as if swan diving into its depths.

The concluding Stravinsky suite, for all of its sizzle, is woven of thin cloth, with a handful of motifs that reappear again and again. It succeeds on its rhythmic energy and on the musicians' virtuosity as the score's spotlight moves from section to section - and Saturday, it was a success indeed.

Shimada kept the polyrhythms brewing, creating a sense of ostinato as its unifying character. He drew on all of its sonic power, especially the nearly sub-sonic rumblings from the large bass section, the contrabassoon and that most Russian basso profundo of instruments, the bass clarinet.

Virtually all of the principals had fine moments, often paired or in trios. Flutist Nancy Chaput, oboist Anne Megan, pianist Gary Chapman, bassoonist Tracy McGinnis, English hornist Olav van Hezewijk, trumpeter Julia Caruk, and concertmaster Stephan Tieszen all earned their bows.

The sound world was luxurious, from muted brass ensembles to bass clarinet and clarinet doubling to create a box organ effect. The one flaw was the use of an electronic keyboard for the celeste, which sounded far more like a synth than the sparkling chimes of the true instrument.

Capriccio - Winter 2010

Click here to read our Winter Newsletter.

Congratulations to our
Executive Director!

By Milton Moore Article published Nov 16, 2009

A starry night for the ECSO

New London - Saturday evening's concert by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra was a tribute to thinking big.

Music director Toshi Shimada fronted a big orchestra bristling with percussionists, led three works that took very different approaches to create a sense of the monumental, and collaborated with the biggest name soloist the ECSO has presented in many a year.

The soloist was pianist Peter Serkin - he of musical royalty, the son of pianist Rudolf Serkin and grandson of violinist Adolf Busch - who lived up to his billing with a bravura performance of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1. The tall, patrician Serkin, at the peak of his artistic powers at age 62, was commanding as he traversed the scope of this most Romantic of Brahms' major works, alternately explosively forceful and entrancingly introspective.

This is a concert piece that is fueled more by emotion and the quality of expression than by virtuosity, a concerto that was recast from piano sonatas and has far less a sense of soloist and accompaniment than most. Younger soloists could have learned much by watching Serkin and Shimada interact, as they kept close watch on each other and shared the pulse of the work's give-and-take.

In the big two-handed chords that propel the outer movements, Serkin fairly vibrated with energy, especially in the first movement, which Shimada took at a brisk pace and shook off any traces of gloom from its portentous orchestral opening. But most arresting was Serkin's treatment of the hushed, lyrical second theme, as he intensified the drama by hanging off the beat, creating the sense that he was drifting away in his own reverie, while never losing the thread of ensemble. That mood was redoubled in the slow movement, which opened with a lush sonority in the strings and bassoons before Serkin wove a poetic solo so intimate that audience members in the Garde Arts Center must have felt as if they were eavesdropping.

The final movement, the most conventional of the three with its rondo form for pianistic variety, was all dashing excitement. Here, Serkin and Shimada were in constant interplay - on Serkin's return to the expansive second motif, Shimada beamed at him from the podium like a proud father. The mood of collaboration was confirmed when, after a sustained final ovation, Serkin walked around the orchestra to shake hands with the key front desk principals.

Sharing the spotlight in the two other big works on the program were the sonic yin and yang of flutist Nancy Chaput and timpanist Kuljit Rehncy.

The program opened with "blue cathedral," a 1999 tone poem by American composer Jennifer Higdon, the most-performed contemporary work in the U.S.these days. A tribute to the composer's brother, who died in youth, it is built on two singing voices - that of the composer, as voiced by flutist Chaput, and her brother, voiced by clarinet principal Kelli O'Connor.

The Copland-like work started with these two voices over softly sighing strings, and it built in layers of sound, reaching a vibrant sonority as the five percussionists (three playing the chimes together at one point) and timpanist Rehncy joined with a brass chorale. And the orchestral color drifted into new territory in the moving closing measures, as the clarinet seemingly ascended to the heavens over the soft rustle of 50 quiet Chinese bells in the hands of the string players and the eerie hum of glass harmonicas (wine glasses rubbed to vibrate) in the hands of the brass section.

Chaput had the starring role in the program's central piece, Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Weber, a 1943 work written while the German composer was the head of the music department at Yale, where Shimada now teaches.

Shimada was at his finest leading this four-movement work, keeping it light on its feet and, as is becoming his trademark here, transparent in the complex voicings of the intricate sectional interplay. Hindemith brews up a thick contrapuntal stew in much of it, but Shimada never bogged down.

Chaput shined brightly in the complex, long flute obbligato ending the slow movement, a fleet and long-breathed passage that lit up the hall. And Rehncy and the percussionists put on a great show of musicianship as they took a set of variations from the energetic and playful scherzo and made them sing.

It was an entertaining, at times thrilling, evening. Shimada continues to win audience trust in his first season here; both the contemporary work and the potential quagmire of Hindemith were vivid, fresh and well-received. And the appreciative audience gave a long ovation to one member of the ECSO who has yet to pick up an instrument.

Orchestra Executive Director Isabelle Singer was honored at intermission for her 25th anniversary of keeping the orchestra on stage and thriving. Now on her fourth music director here, Singer gets to take much of the credit for orchestra's success.

ECSO board president Paul McGlinchey put it succinctly as he gestured to the orchestra:
"What you see here on the stage, our new music director Toshi Shimada, all these talented musicians … the common thread is Isabelle Singer."

Shimada, Tieszen delight in ECSO concert

By Milton Moore Published on 10/19/2009 in Home »Features »Features

New London- It's easy to be fooled by Toshi Shimada's conducting. Watching Shimada lead the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra without a score in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, conducting the 50-minute work with detailed, full-body control of the 80-piece ensemble, you could be lured into believing that the orchestra is just one vast instrument and Shimada is the virtuoso soloist.

Crafting the long sweep of musical drama, with its nuances of sonic and emotional shape-shifting, was Shimada's obvious triumph Saturday night at the Garde Arts Center. But the orchestra's new music director seems to have the gift for enabling the musicians far more than controlling them.

In Saturday's concert, which also featured a thoroughly entertaining reading of Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 by ECSO Concertmaster Stephan Tieszen, Shimada continued to display what may be his trademark: his ability to reveal inner voices, to display the subtleties of a score without getting lost in the details, and to allow the musicians to play at their best.

In the symphony's opening moments, as clarinetists Kelli O'Connor and Chantal Hovendick paired for the somber “Fate” theme that underpins the entire work, Shimada carried them forward on gently swelling, beautifully phrased sectional playing in the violas and cellos. In the long, exposed solo that opens the lovely second movement, long-time ECSO French horn principal Dana Lord captivated the audience with a gorgeous tone, yet Shimada supported Lord's spotlight moment with seamless sonic bloom growing from the cellos through the violins. And not lost in the infectious waltzing strings of the third movement were the lovely solos by principal bassoonist Tracy McGinnis.

Under Shimada, the ECSO can be thrilling both in its sum and in its parts.
In Tchaikovsky's almost bipolar score that leaps back and forth from fortissimos to pianissimos, Shimada found countless nuances of dynamics in between. The “Fate” theme, which returns again and again in different dramatic roles, seemed endlessly colored, with dynamic tapering within measures at times. This sonic control made the brassy blaze-ups all the more spine-tingling, even savage.

Shimada is also a visual guide for the audience. As the calm second movement love song grew in intensity from the horns and winds through the strings, the conductor was all but vibrating with the mounting tension. After the snarling “Fate” theme shattered the movement's reverie, Shimada bent at the waist and swayed both arms like a human metronome to start the string pizzicatos back in time. In the symphony's finale, as the “Fate” theme finally emerges as a heroic march, the conductor raised himself to full height and threw back his head with a look as triumphant as the theme.

The vast Romantic outpouring of the Tchaikovsky was nicely contrasted by Tieszen's performance of the Mozart concerto, playing on gut strings before Classical-era sized
25-piece orchestra.

Tieszen's solo was a labor of love, with many months of preparation as he not only edited the score using a facsimile copy of Mozart's original, he wrote his own cadenzas, those exposed solo show-stoppers, performed for the first time Saturday.

Playing, as did Mozart, on gut strings, Tieszen cast a sweet sound and an air of intimacy, even in this most playful concerto. In the first movement, he shaped the phrasing and the timbre subtly between phrases to create the sense of an internal dialogue. In the slow movement, he created a breathy swell in the long phrases, rising and falling like an operatic messa di voce. And his cadenzas were delights.

The musical ideas for his first movement cadenza were drawn from the orchestral introduction, first in stops, then with drones accompanying the figures before drifting into a lyrical mood. The slow movement cadenza, which Tieszen said he completed the day before the performance, was based on the see-sawing, back-and-forth figure at the heart of the movement's songlike theme, salted with tangy stops. And the third movement cadenza was based on the goofy theme of the Turkish march section, made even more extreme, and he employed a harmonic sleight-of-hand to lyrically slide out of it all.

The cadenzas were characteristic, perhaps more fitting the source music than many in common use, with a sense of freshness and adventure, and Tieszen salted the final movement with a number of ornaments of his own making.

The concerto suffered a bit from an imbalance at times between the orchestra and soloist, due to the inherent differences between modern strings and gut strings. And at the start of the Turkish march, as Shimada turned to look at the violinist with an impish smile, Tieszen knocked his score from the stand and had to pause the performance to reassemble its many sheets.

The program opened with Toru Takemitsu's 1982 “Star-Ilse,” a concise tone-painting inspired by the composer's communion with nature.

Saturday's concert was Shimada's third leading the ECSO (including his audtion last year), and he continued to reveal not just the beauty and vitality of the scores, but the talent of his musicians. The mood in the hall, and the orchestra itself, couldn't be brighter.

To view the recent article in the Rotary Anchor click here.

ECSO an awesome part of community

Published on 10/17/2009 in Home »Editorial »Letters to The Editor

I had the privilege to attend the opening of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra for the season on Sept. 26. I could have closed my eyes and thought that the Chicago Symphony was in front of me. Their sound was in a word, awesome.

The new director Toshiyuki Shimada seemed to be a perfect fit for this talented orchestra. While leading he seemed to also highlight their talents. I have followed the evolution of this fine orchestra since before Paul Phillips. I thought that the symphony reached its zenith under Mr. Phillips, but they played on an even higher level here. It was hard for me to believe that this orchestra was local. What they do for the community cannot be overstated. The concert rose to a crescendo with “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Although the pianist was a virtuoso, the orchestra stayed with him perfectly, to provide an incredible experience.

Edward Stoltz New London
"Regional"

October 13, 2009

By Milton Moore

Mozart & Me

ECSO violinist turns composer for concerto

To prepare for this weekend's performance of a Mozart violin concerto, Stephan Tieszen rehearses with his 1723 violin and sings into his 2009 Blackberry. Eras change, but Stephan and Wolfgang are in intense collaboration right now.

As concertmaster of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra in New London, Tieszen is usually the first among equals when the 80 musicians gather to perform. Saturday, Tieszen gets to leave his seat to stand front and center as the soloist in Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5.

He has soloed before with the orchestra, including a performance of the vast Beethoven Violin Concerto in 1998. But this time, it's different.

This time, Tieszen is writing his own cadenzas, the solo passages where the violinist can take the basic musical material of the movement and, in effect, riff on it like a jazzman. Back in the late 1700s, when musicians such as Mozart and Haydn wrote concertos, they generally left the riffing to the trusted performer, since they were so often the soloists.

As time passed, composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn left nothing to chance and wrote out cadenzas, giving the soloist the space to show off while retaining the musical line the composers intended.

Later in the 19th century, many accomplished soloists wrote excellent cadenzas for older works, and these eventually became published and engrained into 20th century performances. For much of the 20th century, even the best violinists, even Heifetz, played somebody else's cadenzas. But this is the 21st century, and Tieszen - like many other musicians - is going back to basics. He is getting into Mozart's head and writing his own cadenzas.

”Because we come to Mozart as adults,” he says, “we play it the wrong way. The violin concertos were written by a teenager, and the silly and flippant nature of the music often goes right by us.” Mozart's music is full of puns and gags, poking fun at another composer's music or a then-famous performer's style. If you don't know the cultural references, you don't get the gags. ”It would be like him watching 'The Simpsons,'” Tieszen says.

Tieszen makes a fine interpreter of Mozart because, like the composer, he has a highly attuned sense of the absurd, laughs easily and always stops for a good joke. Tieszen knows that a Mozart violin concerto is plenty engaging for those of us who don't have a Ph.D. in music, but his research deepens his own understanding of the musical ideas that are the grist for the cadenzas.

A concerto has three movements, and each has a cadenza, a place where the orchestra stops and the violinist gets to show off. The first and last movements are quick-paced, with a number of themes and variants for Tieszen to explore. But the middle movement is a leisurely, gorgeous operatic aria for the violin - this is the tough one.

Tieszen laughs as he holds up his Blackberry. “I think I got it,” he says. “I had an idea driving here on 95, so I sang it into my phone so I wouldn't forget.” It's safe to say that Tieszen is obsessed right now, consumed with preparation. He is poring over manuscripts, editing and annotating not just the solo violin part, but the score for every member of the orchestra. Published scores often contain errors (there's a lot of notes), and Mozart's original handwritten manuscript, called an “autograph score,” had disappeared in the fog of World War II only to re-emerge about 15 years ago.

Tieszen opens a facsimile of the autograph score, and the dilemma is clear. Imagine an impetuous 18-year-old, writing quickly with a scratchy quill pen by candlelight. The first issue is the dots and dashes on the manuscript. A dash drawn beneath a note means it should be played staccato; a dot means the note should be shortened followed by a rest. Peer at the hand-written pen stabs, and you wonder: Is that a dash or a dot?

When you combine this inexact penmanship with Mozart's personality that merged innovative genius with childlike playfulness, you can see that a lot of high points may have been flattened from his score by later generations. As Tieszen puts it: Is that ornament a joke, or is it an error? A pedantic editor would probably call it an error, and “fix” it.

Mozart never liked to repeat himself, but other composers usually repeated whole sections of their music quite literally. That same editor, seeing Mozart goofing around with a repeat, might simply ignore what was before his eyes and publish a literal repeat.

Tieszen's editing is a tricky business, requiring the skills of a musician and a historian, energized by an appreciation for he calls Mozart's “inspired silliness.”

”It usually takes me three months to prepare one of these, but actually, it's taken me 20 years,” he says. Tieszen speaks in detail of using the proper period bow and the proper combination of metal and gut strings on his violin. He speaks of the sources he's read that infer the sort of vibrato and phrasing used by the teenage Mozart when he performed.

Tieszen jumps from 21st-century pop culture references, characterizing one Mozartian
of musical material as “a little kid with ADD racing around the house,” to Bach's technical underpinnings of harmonics that both he and Mozart studied. He points to a passage in one of his hand-written cadenzas and cheerfully says, “See, it's a retrograde inversion!”For audience members Saturday at the Garde Arts Center, this extreme attention to detail will probably go unnoticed. The concerto will flow from orchestra and soloist with all of the beauty and playfulness and sense of inevitability that has kept Mozart beloved for centuries.

And that's the point: Never let 'em see you sweat.

"New London-CT"

September 28, 2009

A happy 'hello' for the ECSO audience

By Milton Moore

Published on 9/28/2009 in Home »Features »Features New London -

Toshiyuki Shimada did not disappoint. The ovation was long and strong at the Garde Arts Center Saturday when he simply showed his face on stage, and the new music director of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, so winning in his tryout here a year ago, once again charmed the audience with his wit and delighted them with his music-making.

From the long lyrical spans of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony to the rapid-fire metric complexities of Bernstein's Overture to “Candide,” Shimada proved a perfect fit, revealing talents of the ECSO ensemble and principals seldom heard before. He led an intentionally tuneful, crowd-pleasing program that thoroughly pleased the near-sell-out crowd.

An assistant professor of conducting at Yale and music director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Shimada began the evening with a brief statement of appreciation at his selection from a group of six finalists to replace Xiao-Lu Li, who led the ECSO for a decade. Shimada gestured to the audience as he said, “We are now starting, all together, our collaboration.” He had programmed what he called “a pop-sy concert … You will be saying, “I know this tune.’” He opened with Rossini's Overture to “William Tell,” a television staple from “Loony Tunes” to “The Lone Ranger,” to prove his point.

Sharing the spotlight with Shimada were many of the orchestra's principals: new cello principal, the 25-year-old Romanian-born Mihai Marica, whose obbligatos and very presence seem to have transformed a crucial section; oboist Anne Megan; trumpet principal Julia Caruk; and above all, clarinet principal Kelli O'Connor, who along with Clark had a ball wandering off the charts in Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue.”

From cellist Marica's opening of the Rossini overture and the unexpected pleasures of the singing operatic voice in the cello section, the orchestra played superbly for Shimada - and seemed to know it. There were smiles everywhere.

Shimada appears immune to performance pressure; he radiated a sense of ease and comfort fronting the 80-plus musicians. He is active in his cuing, attentive with the baton when called for and physically dynamic without seeming showy. He did flash some moments of showmanship, pantomiming a rider during the galloping rhythms of the hoe-down in Copland's “Rodeo.” After the applause, he said to the audience, “You have never seen a Japanese cowboy before, have you?” He had the audience howling with his demonstration of his Texas/Japanese accent, acquired during his five years with the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

During the lyrical and emotive Schubert, a few audience members clapped after the first movement, and Shimada turned to hush them. Afterward, he explained he felt clapping between movements breaks the flow of the composition, and at the end of the first movement of the four-movement Copland, when a smattering of applause rippled, he turned with a sly smile and waved four fingers. But, as in his tryout here, it was the response of the musicians that was most dramatic. Once again, Shimada gave this orchestra a new sound, more transparent to reveal all of the voices and more sectionally balanced. He is skillful in the shaping of dynamics, mastering the acoustic challenges of the hall, and has a keen sense of harmonic structure that reaches across many measures, even in episodic works like the Rossini and Copland.

In the Rossini, it was the nuances of the slow passages that were a revelation, no longer mere connective tissue. And in the Schubert, he carried the long singing melodies to the dark and bitter outbursts that punctuate the developments as if these long harmonic journeys were inevitable. The Bernstein overture, with its crazy 3/2 meters and tumble-down-the-stairs phrasings, was a cheerful romp, propelled by five percussionists, and Shimada was grinning broadly through much of it.

The scripted program ended with pianist Jeffrey Biegel soloing in “Rhapsody in Blue” - “the United Airlines theme,” as Shimada put it. Biegel gave the solos a surprising intimacy, a sense of a jazzman's musings late at night in a saloon, and the orchestra played with jazzy freedom in the solos.

By that point, Shimada had his audience so at ease that during the encore of “Stars and Stripes Forever” (a tip of the cap to Arthur Fiedler), the audience not only clapped in time, there were scattered pockets of sing-alongs of the grade school version: “Be kind to our fine feathered friends …”

Shimada seems a perfect fit for this orchestra and audience. On the podium, he appears both a peer of the musicians before him and a soloist playing this orchestra like a keyboard. And he is just plain likable, sort of equal parts Leonard Bernstein (with whom he studied) in his air of command, and Victor Borge, with his dry and ready humor.

The audience arrived early, many coming from a black-tie fundraiser across the street at the Thames Club, and stayed late, for sweets and champagne in the lobby. Thanks to Shimada's debut performance, the ECSO should expect many return customers.

ECSO'S NEW ORCHESTRA MEMBERS

We welcome the following people who recently auditioned to the Eastern Connecticut Orchestra:

Mihai Marica - Principal Cello

Sunhee Jeon - Section Cello

Alvin Wong - Section Cello

Beth Ringel - Section Cello