Romance,” the next concert by the Boulder Chamber Orchestra (BCO), will offer music that is unfamiliar, yet comfortable for the audience.
“I would say it’s an adventure, but it’s all about beautiful melodies,” conductor Bahman Saless says of the program, which will include lesser known works by Brahms and Dvorák, and two major works by the little known Russian composer Anton Arensky.
The performances in Boulder Friday (7:30 p.m. Jan. 30, First United Methodist Church) and in Broomfield Saturday (7:30 p.m. Jan. 31, Broomfield Auditorium) will feature violinist Andrew Sords playing Arensky’s Violin Concerto and Dvorák’s Romance for violin and orchestra. Other works on the program will be Arensky’s Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky for strings, and Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn for full orchestra.
“The music is very approachable,” Saless says. “I think ‘Romance’ is the perfect name I could give it. It immediately tells you it’s a friendly concert, right?”
Although not a familiar name today, Arensky was once considered one of Russia’s most promising composers. He studied with Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory 1879- 82, where he graduated with a gold medal, and later was director of the Imperial Choir until his premature death in 1906.
His violin concerto, which Sords characterizes as “Tchaikovsky light,” is rarely played, but Sords and Saless think it should be better known. For Sords, it is one of several unfamiliar works that he has recently added to his repertoire. “I’m very glad that I’m taking it on and giving people this chance to listen to it,” he says.
For Saless, the Arensky Concerto is a piece that he heard as a teenager and always wanted to play. “I remember listening to it,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This is a beautiful piece of music!’” He never got to perform it as a violinist, but when he and Sords started talking about the program, it didn’t take them long to discover their shared love for the concerto.
Sords enjoys presenting pieces that are not well known, but they do offer their own challenges. For one thing, he says, “when you’re working on a piece that’s not mainstream, and you didn’t listen to it from the age of six onwards, it’s very difficult to memorize. The Arensky is very hard to commit to memory [so] I will be playing it from music.”
The violin part is difficult in other ways, too. Arensky was not a violinist, so he did not always know the best way to write for the instrument.
“I believe Arensky was a pianist,” Sords says. “Some of the passages seem like Mr. Arensky sat down at the piano and thought, ‘How can I expound on this theme?’ And where it may lie easily on the piano, it doesn’t do so well on the violin.”
Once Saless and Sords had settled on the Arensky Concerto, the rest of the program fell easily into place. One thing that fit perfectly alongside the relatively short Arensky Concerto is the Dvorák Romance for violin and orchestra, which gave its title to the concert as a whole.
Saless recalls a performance of the Romance he heard when visiting the composer’s house in Prague. He thought, “Why aren’t we playing this more often? It’s such an incredibly gorgeous piece of music!” When he turned to the rest of the orchestra program, Saless thought it made sense to include another piece by Arensky, Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky, written as an homage to the older composer the year after his death.
“It’s as if it literally is a good-bye song to Tchaikovsky,” Saless says. “It ends very sadly. He uses harmonics and pizzicato to bring the melody back at the very end, and it’s very poignant.”
With one set of variations in the program, Saless then thought of Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn as a compliment. Brahms wrote this lesser known score early in his career, not long before he completed the first of his four symphonies.
The two variation sets are very different, Brahms being more academic and classical in approach, Arensky being more emotional and, Saless says, “very Russian” in style. But either way, Saless relishes presenting them with the BCO.
“I love variations!” he says “It’s one of my favorite things to do [because] it gives me a chance to talk to [the audience]. I can tell people, ‘This is what he is doing and this is how you should listen to it.’”
So if you are attracted to the BCO’s “Romance,” you can expect some lovely but unfamiliar music — and a little help from the conductor.
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