Little Orchestra Society

I probably do not need to justify anything I put on this blog, but I do prefer to stick to the four main topics after which this blog is named.   I include The Little Orchestra Society because at the Dvorak performance we saw on Saturday they included a marvelous  pas de deux to Slavonic Dance No. 7, danced by Shoshana Rosenthal and James Shee, from the Tom Gold Dance Company.  Tom Gold was a marvelous dancer for The New York City Ballet and this dance was quite influenced by Balanchine's folk dances in a number of ballets, especially Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.  It was part of a number of Dvorak excerpts, including "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka, beautifully sung by Bryn Holdsworth.

Last year when we went to the LOS concerts with our daughter, who is now four, they had more goofiness than serious music, but this year the proportions have been reversed  They had a character portraying Dvorak and plenty of audience involvement, making the kinds of sounds that influenced the American Quartet and playing the tambourines that were distributed to all the children in the audience, but they also took the music quite seriously and though the didactic elements were played for humor, as in a video of shopping for a horn to illustrate what an English horn was, they were also quite informative. After the shopper returned with everything from a shoehorn to a bicycle horn Randall Ellis, in the orchestra, pulled out a genuine English horn and played a lovely excerpt from Dvorak's Symphony No. 9.

At this performance, as well as at the Mozart performance we saw and heard on Nov. 8, they used some very young soloists (Han Lee on the cello for a Dvorak cello concerto, Alex Manasse on clarinet and Oliver and Clara Neubauer on violin and viola for Mozart) who made quite an impression on the audience, ages 3 to 7.   I think one of the difficulties one has with concerts and concert halls is the often overweening stuffiness.  Music is to be enjoyed, as Rex Harrison said in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours, "with a sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other" and The Little Orchestra Society captures some of that sense of fun.