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Rhapsody in the park
Grab a blanket and head for the park, where the Florida Orchestra will present an open-air concert. Don't miss the grande finale with Tchaikovsky and fireworks.
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 19, 2000
If the weather cooperates, the Florida Orchestra will play for its largest audiences of the year this weekend in a pair of park concerts.
"We've had up to 10,000 people in Straub Park," said general manager Jeff Woodruff. "It's a fun community event. It reaches a lot of people who are not going to go over to the Mahaffey Theater to hear the orchestra. By the same token, there are a lot of people who go hear the orchestra in Mahaffey who also like the idea of just spreading a blanket out in the park and enjoying the lighter fare."
On Saturday night, the orchestra will give its seventh annual concert in North Straub Park on the St. Petersburg waterfront. Sunday, it will play its first concert in Curtis Hixon Park on the Hillsborough River in downtown Tampa. The concert in Clearwater's Coachman Park is held in the spring.
Resident conductor Tom Wilkins will lead the orchestra in a program ranging from light classics such as Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody to the overture from Gershwin's Girl Crazy to a medley of cartoon themes from The Jetsons and The Flintstones.
It's a shift in musical gears for Wilkins. Last weekend, he was guest conductor with the New Mexico Symphony in a Mozart symphony, Verdi's Te Deum, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms and Respighi's Pines of Rome. He is one of nine candidates to become music director of the Albuquerque-based orchestra.
In park concerts, Wilkins is a genial presence on the podium. "He just has this magical connection with everybody, from musical connoisseurs to the people who are hearing an orchestra play for the first time," Woodruff said.
Orchestra players accept park concerts as a necessary evil. The elements can play havoc with their instruments, and many of the musicians use lesser ones than what they normally play.
"A lot of the string players have so-called park instruments," Woodruff said. "Direct sun is a no-no, and you never know when it'll rain."
Park concerts cost as much as $40,000 to produce, with the orchestra playing from a covered stage. The music is amplified.
"For Straub, we will have the main speakers on either side of the stage, and then about halfway back on the lawn, a stack of relay speakers to amplify the sound to the back half of the park," Woodruff said.
"Acoustically, it's a compromised environment. You don't want to play stuff where there's something less than mezzo forte going on."
That's no problem with the traditional rousing finale of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, Stars and Stripes Forever and fireworks.
Music preview
The Florida Orchestra plays two free park concerts this weekend: 7 p.m. Saturday at North Straub Park in St. Petersburg; and 5:30 p.m. Sunday at Curtis Hixon Park in Tampa. Fireworks follow each concert.
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