Open Wardrobes

This week is the first week of the International Chamber Orchestra Festival (ICO Festival), hosted by The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra as part of its 50th anniversary season (which means that, as an SPCO employee, life has been a little crazy!). Each of the 4 weeks of the festival features a different guest orchestra. In week 1 this is the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE), which of all the guest orchestras is most like the SPCO in that they too perform a wide range of repertoire (as opposed to only playing music from one period). Each weekend also features a variety of different concert programs with different combinations of the orchestras playing together or alone.


I attended last night's concert at the Ordway which featured the SPCO and the COE playing several pieces together, all under the baton of Douglas Boyd. Douglas Boyd is one of the Artistic Partners of the SPCO, plus he was a founding member of the COE (who he played with for many years as an oboeist), and so this made him the perfect conductor to bring the two orchestras together. And he did so seamlessly, they played for all purposes as one unified orchestra. The concert opened with a piece by Tippitt (20th century) composed specifically for two groups of string players (as, indeed, all of the night's pieces were). It was a lovely piece, lush and beautiful, quite the opposite of the usual stereotype of modern music as being atonal and dissonant. The concluding Bartok piece also shunned this stereotype. I found the first movement a little slow, but the lively 4th movement with its dramatic finish made up for that. But the highlight of the concert was the Vaughan Williams piece, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. It was, without exaggeration, the most beautiful thing I have ever heard, a beauty only accentuated by hearing it live. It was simply amazing.


All in all a fantastic concert and one of the best I've heard from the SPCO (which is saying something). There are still three weeks left of the ICO Festival and my hope is to catch at least one performance with each of the visiting orchestras.