Peter Jacobi
Bloomington Herald Times
October 4, 2010
Charles Latshaw must have told his musicians in the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra to play their hearts out. They surely did so in a program celebrating 20th century American music, given at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church.
From the first downbeat of Latshaw’s baton, they did. Their brash, bold reading of Morton Gould’s rousing “American Salute,” written during World War II to spur patriotism and build optimism, was spirit-soaked. What’s more, and equally important to do the piece justice, the orchestra’s performance was commendably disciplined.
Those qualities, spirit and discipline, marked the whole of a concert that also featured Randall Thompson’s “Frostiana,” Samuel Barber’s First Essay for Orchestra, and George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” For “Frostiana,” an evocative setting for orchestra and chorus of seven poems by Robert Frost, the BSO was joined by Susan Swaney’s Unitarian Universalist Choir. The poems themselves — including “The Road Not Taken,” “The Telephone,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — breed nostalgia for a rural New England past. Thompson’s music, composed in 1959, treats the content with affection, as complement to the words, never as intrusion. Choir and orchestra followed suit.
Barber’s First Essay for Orchestra, premiered by Arturo Toscanini in 1938, is a stately, elegantly orchestrated affair that gave the musicians an opportunity to sound lush and beautiful. Latshaw made sure they availed themselves of it.
As for “An American in Paris,” we remain fortunate that Gershwin, as tourist, took a walk around that city in 1926 and decided to recall it in music. He created an adventure made ever shareable by the ingenuity of the score, a conjuring tonal portrait of sightseeing amidst the sounds of urban bustle and traffic. Latshaw and the orchestra joined the perambulating composer with relish. As consequence, so could the audience, which thanked the musicians with cheers.