"Eternal Quest" Insights

Will we ever discover the answers to all the important questions in life? Perhaps not, but it is the noble search for answers that defines us. Our Classics II concerts, entitled “Eternal Quest,” embody that sense of wondering and exploration.

Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde portrays a search for eternal love, based on the Medieval legend and infused with a healthy dose of Schopenhauer’s 19^th-century philosophy. The drama’s famous Prelude and Love Death, with passages unfolding in beauty yet defying resolution, create the “insatiable longing” of the main characters—the harmonic language and melodic technique that Wagner developed would influence the course of music history.

Bloch was in the process of making a musical setting of King Solomon’s book of Ecclesiastes when he came to an important realization: rather than using sung text, his work could gain an entirely new dimension with the voiceless beauty of the cello. The resulting masterpiece is Schelomo, expressing Solomon’s quest for meaning. Taking on the powerful and compassionate solo role is Israeli cellist Amit Peled, a fast-rising international star.

Charles Ives was one of America’s most forward-looking experimentalists, stretching the imagination and employing concepts way ahead of his time. A brief work written around 1906, The Unanswered Question delivers a novel take on the perennial question of existence, with three independent streams of music separated by space and time.

Elgar’s beloved Enigma Variations is a set of character tributes to dear friends. Here the searching and questioning is our fate rather than the composer’s. Elgar claimed his main theme was based on a famous tune, yet he never revealed his source, and the resulting thematic mystery remains debated to this day! No matter, for the work takes us on a splendid journey in Romantic style, artfully juxtaposing intimate and grandiose effects and leading to an exultant conclusion.

Comin’ Up Aces

We came off the stage from our Stockton Symphony season open with a real sense of exhilaration, and loved the satisfaction of communicating with our audience through music. One of the most exciting—and challenging!—aspects of live performance is that we must “be our art” right at the moment. It doesn’t matter how well we did in our rehearsals, or even when it was time for the Saturday performance, how well we did in the Thursday night performance. We have to rise to each occasion with new heights of zeal and artistic excellence, ’cause it counts at that moment. That’s the “elegant risk” of live performance. That’s why it’s so exciting to play for you, our beloved audience, and that’s why live concerts will never die out.

The opening of Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture is notoriously difficult for the horns. The music is so exposed and pure—it’s more than walking on eggshells, it’s like walking on eggshells naked! Our horns aced it.

The Bruch Violin Concerto is a masterpiece combining sweeping lyricism with extremely demanding pyrotechnics. Not only did our guest artist Elena Urioste rise superbly to the occasion, but—here’s a bit of inside news—she did it with a cold. ’Ya know that kind of feeling you get when a cold first sets in—everything in the head gets all congested and it’s hard to think straight, much less hear properly? That’s what Elena was going through. But she’s a real pro and the show must and did go on. And most importantly, nobody could have known—’cause Elena was triumphant.

Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony is a true masterpiece of the 20^th century, yet for some inexplicable reason, it’s performed much less often than, say, Shostakovich’s Fifth. Many in our orchestra had never performed this glorious work before. On second thought, maybe the reason for its relative infrequency isn’t all that inexplicable—it’s hard! There isn’t a single principal player or instrumental section that doesn’t get some virtuose moment to tackle. The musicians of the Stockton Symphony are fabulous. They scored a real victory.

Do we feel a sense of letdown after a concert set? You bet. But the wonderful thing is, we know there’s always something great waiting for us in the near future: it’s the next concert, it’s the next live moment.