The Charleston Symphony, Music Director Yuriy Bekker, and the Harlem Quartet onstage at Carnegie Hall following a performance of Edward Hart’s A Charleston Concerto on Feb. 26.
In Thursday’s (2/27) New York Classical Review, David Wright writes, “Three stagefuls of musicians from Charleston occupied Carnegie Hall Wednesday night, in what was billed as ‘A Celebration of Charleston.’ Familiar masterworks alternated with a selection of orchestral Charlestoniana that provided the evening’s most arresting moments…. The Charleston Symphony Youth Orchestra of 13-to-18-year-olds yielded the stage to the College of Charleston Orchestra and ultimately the very grownup Charleston Symphony…. Ryo Hasegawa led [the youth orchestra] in Charleston Mix, [a world premiere] composed for the occasion by … Thomas Cabaniss. The piece began and ended with the musicians clapping in the 3-3-2 rhythm that drove the ‘Charleston” dance craze of the 1920s. In between, a dance tune started in the tuba and clarinet, then roamed through the orchestra, players standing as they took their solos…. Hasegawa and his players poured on the youthful fervor in Sibelius’s Finlandia … Then it was the collegians’ turn, playing colorfully in the New York premiere of Corsaro, a swashbuckling piece by one of their own faculty members, Yiorgos Vassilandonakis…. The composer produced an orchestral seascape gleaming with brass and burbling with bassoons, as flutes whistled overhead…. The next work [was] by New Jersey-based Trevor Weston, Subwaves. His tribute to the sounds of public transit, and the Hip Hop pioneers who hung out there, began of course with a near-incessant rumble of timpani and bass drum, from which stuttering horns and syncopated strings emerged. Two plaintive interludes … separated the piece’s plunging, agitated sections, vividly drawn by Bekker and his players,” who also performed the finale of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9. “The Charleston Symphony performed the New York premiere of Edward Hart’s A Charleston Concerto, featuring the Harlem Quartet as soloists. The composer … took a sweeping view of his city’s history in three substantial movements.” The Charleston Symphony closed the concert with Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.”
