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Arts

First chair

And in it sits injured music director Stefan Sanderling, who leads the Florida Orchestra into a new season heavy on challenges.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published October 2, 2005

Beethoven rules. All nine of his symphonies are being played during the Florida Orchestra's 2005-06 season.

It's not that Beethoven has been in short supply. Last season, the orchestra played three of his symphonies plus other works. But all Beethoven all the time is popular with the marketers of classical music because it sells at the box office. This season, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic also are performing all the symphonies.

In an effort to bring a bit of novelty to the programming, music director Stefan Sanderling has matched each Beethoven symphony with similar-numbered works by other composers. For example, he joined the Third Symphony with Turnage's exquisitely named Three Screaming Popes and Schuman's New England Triptych on a program in February.

Sanderling's numerical brainchild can seem forced, but it did inspire the inclusion of quite a few works never played by the orchestra, such as Boccherini's Cello Concerto No. 6, Honegger's Fifth Symphony and Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 1 (A Sea Symphony).

The first masterworks concert of the season is Saturday night at Pasadena Community Church, the orchestra's venue in St. Petersburg while the Mahaffey Theater is closed for renovation. Performances follow at Ruth Eckerd Hall and the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

The orchestra has been in rehearsals since late September. There is a free concert of pops and light classics at 7 tonight in downtown Clearwater's Coachman Park, with associate conductor Susan Haig on the podium. This is the first of nine park concerts throughout the season, including two weekday lunchtime performances in Lykes Park in downtown Tampa.

In a preseason concert last night at Ruth Eckerd Hall, the orchestra got started on its Beethoven cycle with the Eighth Symphony. Sanderling was scheduled to conduct, even though he is hobbled by fractures in both feet and his left shoulder suffered in a fall down a flight of stairs in August. In his third season as music director, he may be leading the orchestra from a seated position for a while.

Along with Beethoven, there are two composer anniversaries to commemorate this season. One is the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth (Jan. 27, 1756), and the orchestra will be playing his Clarinet Concerto, featuring principal clarinet Brian Moorhead as soloist, as well as the 34th Symphony. The other is the 100th anniversary of Shostakovich's birth (Sept. 25, 1906), with his 11th Symphony on the season-opening program.

Shostakovich is a Sanderling specialty, an outgrowth of the relationship between the conductor's father, Kurt Sanderling, and the Russian composer. The elder Sanderling was co-conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic when it premiered many Shostakovich works in the 1940s and '50s.

Stefan already has taken the measure of Shostakovich 11 this season. As principal conductor of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, he conducted the work in that orchestra's season-opening concerts in September.

Younger conductors - Sanderling is 41 - like to test their mettle on the big symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, and this season's lineup includes Bruckner's Third and Mahler's Ninth. Beethoven's Ninth is on his agenda, too, in concerts with the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay in December.

Other highlights of the season include soprano Lisa Vroman in The Seven Deadly Sins of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, backed by the male vocal ensemble Hudson Shad; the Turkish piano duo and twin sisters Ferhan and Ferzan Onder in Bartok's orchestral arrangement of his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; the Master Chorale in Dvorak's Requiem, Grant Llewellyn conducting; and soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme in Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs.

The pops season gets under way Oct. 14 to 16, with pops music director Richard Kaufman leading a program of film music. The schedule includes well-known figures such as Patti Austin (in an Ella Fitzgerald tribute) and Irish fiddler Eileen Ivers. Much anticipated is Pink Martini, a lounge band from Portland, Ore., that the orchestra has sought to book for several years.

Haig is the orchestra's conductor of all trades, performing in each series and the park concerts. Her masterworks program is an all-Russian affair, with Karen Gomyo as the soloist in the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1. Haig reprises last season's holiday hit, a gospel treatment of Messiah.

Under Haig, the coffee series delves into a wide range of repertoire, from Wagner to Cole Porter, Faure to John Adams. Many of these morning concerts will feature orchestra members as soloists, including pianist Mary Pendleton, piccolo player Lewis Sligh and double bassist Dee Moses.

On the downside this season, the orchestra's seemingly everlasting venue problems will continue. With Mahaffey undergoing renovation, at least until March, masterworks, pops and coffee concerts in St. Petersburg are at Pasadena Community Church, with a stage erected in the sanctuary. It's a large church, with seating for about 1,650, but the dislocation will take a toll on the orchestra's bottom line. Already, subscription sales are off 15 percent from last season in St. Petersburg.

The city of St. Petersburg, which owns Mahaffey, has pledged to cover the orchestra's losses connected with the change in venue, reasoning that it wants to keep the primary user of the theater as healthy as possible financially. That subsidy will be essential, because the costs could mount to bring the church to something close to concert standards. Acoustics are bound to be less than ideal, with no orchestra shell to help focus the sound. The wear and tear on musicians and staff (and audience members) in coping with a temporary venue will be considerable.

Then there's the perennial struggle of trying to get into Morsani Hall of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, where Broadway tours and other acts take priority over the orchestra. Last season, the orchestra instituted "Mondays at Morsani," choosing to play its Tampa masterworks concerts on the least convenient night of the week in order to get into the preferred hall on a consistent basis. Not surprisingly, ticket sales plunged, with a 30 percent loss of subscriptions from the previous season. The 2,400-seat hall was usually about half-full.

Now the orchestra can't even get into Morsani on all the Mondays it wants. Of 14 masterworks programs this season at TBPAC, just 10 will be on Mondays in Morsani. Two will be Mondays in Ferguson Hall, a smaller space with dubious acoustics, and two will be Fridays in Morsani. So much for consistency.

Not just concerts are affected by these venue problems. Many rehearsals this season will be held at Pasadena Community Church and the Springs Theatre, a recording studio in Tampa.

Unlike last season, when the orchestra had to deal with the loss of its concertmaster and principal flute, the musical personnel remains largely intact. Jeff Multer will be acting concertmaster, having occupied the first violin chair on a guest basis last season. There are several new players on one-year contracts in the violin and horn sections. The only titled player on the way out is Artur Girsky, the principal second violin who is joining the Seattle Symphony.

- John Fleming can be reached at 727 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 29, 2005, 11:16:04]