From the Bloomington Herald Times:
Music review: BSO, BLEMF programs
Great promise in two shows
By Peter Jacobi H-T Reviewer
October 29, 2007
The Bloomington Symphony Orchestra has for itself and our listening pleasure a new and impressive young music director. Charles Latshaw is an IU Jacobs School of Music alum whose promise earned him a coveted 2007 Herbert von Karajan Conducting Fellowship with the Vienna Philharmonic.He revealed his skill Saturday evening as he led the BSO, the city’s community orchestra, through its fall concert at the Evangelical Community Church, a “Fate Knocking at the Door” program obliquely inspired, one supposes, by the Halloween season. The connection could be made in the choice of Michael Daugherty’s “Red Cape Tango,” the concluding movement of the composer’s “Metropolis Symphony,” meant to express the fight waged by Superman against Doomsday, a battle which resulted in that fictional hero’s death. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, however, dealt with fate from a worlds-away perspective.
But program labels serve promotional purposes. What mattered were the music itself (powerful) and how that music was played (amazingly well).
Daugherty’s score amounts to variations built on the ancient Dies Irae theme. The orchestration is clever, replete with bones clicking and chimes ringing and thumps thumping. The welter of sound effects, also marked by rhythms crossing wildly with rhythms, made for hefty performance challenges, all met. Latshaw had rehearsed his ensemble thoroughly, and his cues — via baton, hand, body, face — clearly expressed his intentions to the players.
The Tchaikovsky Fifth, so familiar and yet, for musicians, so difficult to realize successfully, received an intense, involved, and even interior reading, in which one could discern the composer’s wrestling with his own demons. For proper balance, the orchestra seriously needs what it has needed for a long while to fill its ranks, more violinists, but — energized by the conductor — it gave the piece a mighty good ride. What one heard portends good things for the BSO, now into its 38th season.