Symphony drums up crowd-pleaser

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 30, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- The Tampa Bay Symphony is a marvelous community resource. Its more than 90 volunteer members are motivated by the love of music. Music director Jack Heller has excellent traditional taste in programming. The symphony promotes education, awarding prizes and giving solo opportunities to promising young musicians. With inexpensive tickets, it draws a good-sized crowd to concerts in each of the bay area's three major halls.

And the symphony is patriotic, too, beginning a program with the Star-Spangled Banner and ending with a sing-along of America the Beautiful.

So how does this widely varying group of musicians -- from onetime members of top-level symphony orchestras to people who didn't play beyond college -- sound? Pretty darn good, if your expectations are realistic, judging from Friday night's performance at Mahaffey Theater.

Not surprisingly, the orchestra was at its best in Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, a work that any classical musician has been closely schooled in at one time or another. To be sure, the music was more one-dimensional than it can be in professional hands -- missing was the inner voice of the orchestra, the meaning or feeling behind the notes, the layered sonorities -- and the solos lacked virtuosity. But the performance was an accurate expression of the composer's intentions, which is the most important thing.

Before launching into each movement, Heller, a professor of music at the University of South Florida, explained some of Beethoven's ideas with musical examples played by sections of the orchestra. In effect, he treated the concert hall like his classroom, and most of the audience plainly enjoyed it.

The two winners of the Young Artists' Competition had different approaches to their performances. Cellist Julie Newport, who attends Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School, played a connoisseur's favorite, the finale of Saint-Saens' elegant A-minor Concerto. Pianist Tsun-Yen Luo, a student at Tampa's King High School, took the crowd-pleasing route, playing the slam-bang opening movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2.

Liszt's symphonic poem Les Preludes, a rousing piece of romantic hokum, wound up the program. As pointed out by Anthony Skey, the violinist who writes the program notes, it includes a theme used on the Lone Ranger radio show in the 1940s.

Music Review

The Tampa Bay Symphony repeats its program at 7 p.m. today in the Playhouse of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $10.