Performances include guest artists, small orchestra and full symphony
By Peter Alexander Jan. 8, 2021, at 10:10 p.m.
The Longmont Symphony has announced a spring and summer season of six virtual concerts, featuring solo guest artists, small orchestra ensembles, and the full orchestra.
Tickets for the spring–summer season, Jan. 16–Aug. 7, are on sale, both individually and a discounted package for the full season. All performances will be streamed starting at 7 p.m. Saturdays.
Guest artists will be percussionist Cameron Leach, who was engaged for a concert last spring that was cancelled, Jan. 16; duo pianists Yuki and Tomoko Mack, March 20; and cellist Clancy Newman, Aug. 7. Performances by the LSO will a program of music for strings, including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Feb. 27; an all Mozart program for small orchestra, including the Clarinet Concerto performed by Colorado Symphony principal clarinetist Jason Shafer, April 17; and a full orchestra program June 19.
For the audience, it will be good to see a varied series of programs, but you might miss the most significant feature of the season. “There’s something that’s noteworthy [about the season] and it’s not really about the music at all,” LSO music director Elliot Moore says. “It’s this pivot that the LSO had made during the time of COVID, from presenting an orchestra to becoming a presenting organization.”
Moore is referring to the solo guest artists that the orchestra has presented during the fall and will present during the coming spring and summer. “That is a way that we can keep the level the audience has expected from the Longmont Symphony organization,” he says. “We’ve been able to have unbelievable guest artists that are so engaging that people buy tickets.
“The thing that has been amazing is keeping our commitment to excellence during this time. We’ve done it and I’m proud of it.”
Moore admits that he wasn’t sure what the audience response would be to essentially a hybrid season, including both small orchestra performances and solo artists, all of it online. Today, he is thrilled that the response was so enthusiastic. “Our audience gave us way more than we expected,” he says. “We have a following now for these guest artists.”
Each of the three guest performances during the spring and summer offers something unique, Moore says. Percussionist Cameron Leach “is phenomenal,” he says. “He commissions pieces from all kinds of composers. And one of the things he’s been investigating during the pandemic has been technology—how can he purchase equipment, making a space in his home where can record and have a product to market.”
Concerning duo pianists Yuki and Tomoko Mack, “my thought was it’s really hard to have two pianos here, onstage with the LSO,” Moore says. “There’s not a venue I know of where we could do that. I was thinking, how do I create a season that we wouldn’t always be able to have?”
Himself a cellist, Moore is especially excited to have Clancy Newman as a guest artist “When he was a freshman at Juilliard he beat out undergrads, graduate, doctoral cellists to win the Juilliard Cello Competition— when he was getting a double degree in cello performance and in English at Columbia,” he says.
One thing Newman is known for is writing cello pieces based popular music. “He would every month look at the number-one pop song and create a solo cello caprice that’s like wickedly impossible to perform,” Moore explains. “So he’s going to play a couple of his own cello caprices, based on pop songs.”
The three programs played by the LSO were planned to gradually increase the numbers of performers, in the hopes that recovery from the pandemic will parallel the planed programming. “The idea is, let’s stay safe, in terms of where we are currently,” Moore says.
That meant starting with a program where everyone could be masked, which meant an orchestra of only strings [see full programs below]. Following that is a concert with small orchestra, which in this case is all music by Mozart.
“I have had different ideas about how can I focus on a single composer,” Moore says. “This portrait of Mozart is a good way to pave the path, whether it would be a festival where our community can delve deeper into the works of a specific composer, really get into what was going on in the composer’s lifetime. That’s been on my mind for several years.”
The last of the LSO’s performances will be a program for full orchestra, to be recorded outside and presented in June. “This is the first time we’ve had a summer season, so that’s a new aspect for the Longmont Symphony,” Moore says.
“That will be our first time as an orchestra to get back into rehearsing and performing together. So that really is one of the big points of this season.”
# # # # #
LSO 2021 Spring and Summer
7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 16, 2021
Cameron Leach, percussion: solo concert
7p.m., Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021 -Vivaldi: Four Seasons
Grieg: Holberg Suite
George Walker: Lyric for Strings
Vivaldi: Four Seasons
7 p.m. Saturday, March 20, 2021
Yuki and Tomoko Mack, duo pianists
7 p.m. Saturday, April 17, 2021 –A Portrait of Mozart
Overture to La finta semplice, K.51 (46a)
Concerto for clarinet and orchestra, Jason Shafer, soloist
Symphony No. 25
7 p.m. Saturday, June 19, 2021 –Mendelssohn’s Reformation Symphony
Borodin: Polovtsian Dances
Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 5 (“Reformation”)
7 p.m. Saturday, Aug 7, 2021
Clancy Newman, cello: solo concert
NB: Minor typos corrected 1/9
Sharps & Flatirons 