SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Can a city of 155,000 support a professional orchestra? Yes, indeed. The Springfield Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts has been doing it for more than 80 years. On Oct. 19, the orchestra opened its 2024-25 season at Symphony Hall with its newly appointed artistic adviser, Mei-Ann Chen, leading a program that drew on its regional roots and exercised its artistic imagination.
The Springfield Symphony gives its nine-concert season downtown in Symphony Hall, an imposing Greek revival building dating from 1913. It was renovated in 2004 but still needs some work. And with 2,611 seats, it is really too big for the orchestra and its audience.
But the Springfield community obviously values culture — it has five museums nearby, including one devoted to longtime resident Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)— and has supported the orchestra through some pretty tough times. On the basis of what I heard as a visitor, it certainly deserves that support now and for years to come.
This program was titled “New England Reverie,” and the first two pieces appropriately were by composers born in and active throughout their lives in the Boston area. But, curiously, neither piece suggested reveries or dreams. And the second half was devoted to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I doubt Beethoven ever heard of New England, and his stormy symphony has nothing to do with reveries, either.
George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931) and Amy Beach (1867-1944) were members of a group of composers known as The Boston Six. They were both late Romantics in the musical lineage of Dvořák and Richard Strauss. The concert began with a rousing performance of Chadwick’s “Jubilee” from his Symphonic Sketches of 1904. To a listener hearing the music for the first time without knowing the name of the composer, “Jubilee” would surely sound like movie music. It would have fit very nicely into Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for the 1948 film Red River. But that just means Chadwick was way ahead of his time.
Beach was a child prodigy as a pianist and a gifted all-around musician. But she married a man who thought a woman’s role was primarily to be his helpmate. He made her promise never to be a piano teacher and never give more than two public concerts a year. Despite these restrictions, Beach achieved some major successes: The Boston Symphony played her Gaelic Symphony in 1896 and her Piano Concerto four years later. But interest in her music waned, and she was largely forgotten.
Anne-Marie McDermott is determined to change all that. This season, she has persuaded several orchestras around the country to program Beach’s massive Piano Concerto. In Springfield, she persuaded me that the work not only deserves a hearing but should be a staple in the repertoire.
To judge by the difficulty of the piano part, Beach must have been a formidable pianist. But this is no mere showpiece. Her concerto shows real symphonic writing, and, more importantly, it sounds like nobody else’s music. Not Tchaikovsky nor Saint-Saëns nor anybody else. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 dates from the very next year, and Beach’s concerto doesn’t sound like that, either. Still, like Liszt in his Piano Concerto No. 1, Beach gives the triangle a role in her concerto.
The first movement is long but dramatic, with lots of harmonic conflict. The second movement lightens the mood with a scherzo in perpetual motion. The pianist plays virtually non-stop. In the third movement Largo, the atmosphere darkens, but there are several passages with lovely combinations of orchestral and keyboard textures. Frequent dance rhythms in the finale close out the concerto.
McDermott played brilliantly throughout, and Chen and the orchestra were with her every step of the way. McDermott will play the concerto again Nov. 1-3 with the Dallas Symphony. The Nov. 3 performance will be part of a Women in Classical Music Symposium. In Springfield, after playing the Beach concerto, McDermott was deservedly called back for an encore. She gave us sparkling versions of two movements from one of Bach’s English Suites.
After intermission came that old warhorse, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. But in all the times I have heard (or conducted) the piece, it has almost never failed to inspire conductors, musicians, and audiences. It is simply why we love music and find it so meaningful. From the opening bars in the Springfield Symphony performance, it was clear that the work had been meticulously rehearsed and that everyone involved was loving every minute of it.
It was a fine performance, with special kudos to the cellos and basses for their precision in the third movement. Chen took the repeats in the first and last movements and gave us exemplary Beethoven. She does tend to over-conduct with grand gestures — and professional orchestras can do without the “thumbs up” signals — but on the whole she showed herself to be a serious musician and an excellent communicator.
Chen was born in Taiwan and studied violin, piano, and trumpet from an early age. She took music degrees at the New England Conservatory and the University of Michigan. When she decided to concentrate on conducting, her career grew by leaps and bounds. She has been the conductor of the Chicago Sinfonietta since 2011.
In addition to conducting the Springfield concert, she gave a very informative and entertaining pre-concert talk. She is only conducting two concerts in Springfield this season, but perhaps she can be persuaded to spend more time here in future seasons.
