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German Romanticism From the Utah Symphony at the Berlin Festival
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10291 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
897 Words |
| Author
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Richard Campbell
Richard Campbell is a musicologist, journalist, and freelance
radio producer residing in West Berlin. |
In 1966, the Utah Symphony Orchestra made its first appearance outside of the American West. Its travels took it to Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, England, and West Germany. Included in the tour was a performance at the annual Berlin Festival, which was very warmly received by the local audience and music critics as well. Up to that time very few American orchestras had performed in Europe: the Boston Symphony, the New York philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony. But an orchestra from Utah? People here had perhaps heard of the Great Salt Lake and the Mormon Temple and vaguely knew the geographical location of Salt Lake City, but, they asked, is there really any "culture" out there to warrant maintaining a symphony orchestra? It turns out there was, and, in a judgment that may have come as a surprise to Americans, the West German daily newspaper Die Welt proclaimed on the orchestra's first tour: "The Utah Symphony is one of America's top orchestras."
This past September, twenty years later, the symphony made its third appearance in Berlin, and its second at the Berlin Festival. The musicians are generally young; only four or five familiar faces still remain from earlier days among the eighty-five members. Maurice Abravanel, the highly esteemed music director who for more than three decades molded and guided the orchestra like a loving father with painstaking skill, perseverance, and personality, is no longer there. Yet one still feels the indelible impression that he left on the orchestra, an impression preserved by the present music director, Joseph Silverstein.
Silverstein began his career as a violinist; in 1955 he joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra, advanced to concertmaster in 1962, and was named assistant
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