Review of November 16, 2009, Concert
Ensemble honors former member with favorite hymn
By Peter Jacobi, Bloomington Herald-Times ReviewerNovember 18, 2009
The Southern Indiana Wind Ensemble is just into its third season, but from the sound of things, the group has put an authoritative stamp on its product that says, “We’re here and we’re good.”
The ensemble’s fall concert, given in the auditorium of Bloomington High School North Monday evening, testified to the quality of membership and the players’ ability to coalesce into a true unit. For that to have happened, and so rapidly, means this concert band — an amalgam of area musicians from all walks of life — has been well led. And that it has: by founder and music director Eric Isaacson, a gentleman so unassuming that his name does not appear anywhere in the promotional material or the printed program.
Isaacson, an IU professor of music theory in daytime, obviously has been far more of a force than he lets on. The evidence was clear throughout a program of challenging repertoire, including a performance of the Navy Hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” in a complex arrangement by Claude Smith, chosen because Smith and the hymn were favorites of Debra Cardwell Peterson, a member of the ensemble who died last month. Monday’s concert was played in her memory. One suspects she would have been proud.
Another highlight was provided by soloist David Constantine, an agile timpanist, doctoral candidate in IU’s Jacobs School, and newly named member of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra. He, surrounded by his four kettledrums, dove courageously into a Concertino for Solo Timpani, Winds and Percussion, written in 1972 by the American composer Donald White. The piece holds a parade of demanding tests and also calls for subtle shadings in dynamics. The technical feats proved no problem at all for Constantine, and the shadings were handled with refinement. The ensemble partnered him faithfully.
The program began with “Lauds” (1982), a densely orchestrated, intensely animated, if somewhat monochromatic item that seemed to hold no terrors for the players. More interesting were three parts of a suite Howard Hanson built from music written for his opera, “Merry Mount,” a work first introduced at the Metropolitan Opera back in 1934. Lush romanticism marks this score; Isaacson located that essence and drew it out of his comrades, the more than 50 of them who filled the stage.
Works by three 20th century band stalwarts rounded out the program to highlight the performing ensemble’s bundle of strengths: the Australian Percy Grainger’s “Ye Banks and Braes O’Bonnie Doon” (1936), for tenderness and buoyancy; the English Gustav Holst’s Second Suite in F for Military Band (1911), for flexibility and brilliance of sound; and the American Norman Dello Joio’s Variants on a Mediaeval Tune (1963), a set of variations on “In dulci jubilo,” for the painting of colors. The musicians, with Isaacson on the podium, took creditable care of each.
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