Supporting the Arts in Western Massachusetts and Beyond

January 28, 2025

REVIEW: Springfield Symphony Orchestra, "New Musical World"

Symphony Hall, Springfield, MA
January 18, 2025
by Michael J. Moran

The SSO’s first concert of 2025 featured not only the SSO premieres of three pieces by African-American composers, along with a repertory favorite, but impressive SSO debuts by violinist Melissa White and conductor Courtney Lewis, who “saved the day,” according to the SSO’s CEO Paul Lambert, by stepping in for Jeri Lynne Johnson, forced by illness to cancel three days earlier. Remarkably, the program was unchanged.

The performance opened with a jaunty version of William Grant Still’s 1944 “Festive Overture,” the unanimous winner among 39 entries to a national overture contest by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Its heroic opening fanfare, playful xylophone and trumpet solos, and joyful closing march suggested why. Lewis, the Irish-born Music Director of the Jacksonville (FL) Symphony, and SSO performed with a warm rapport that sounded as if they’d been playing together for years.    

Next came James Lee III’s 2019 “Amer’ican,” a sometimes astringent but always exciting piece, which Lee calls a “21st century response to Dvořák's charge to American composers to incorporate the music of Native and Negro American melodies” in their work. It briefly quotes both Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” which closed the concert, and the Negro spiritual “Here’s One.” Lewis and the orchestra presented a gripping rendition.

White, Lewis, SSO
Melissa White was a riveting soloist in Florence Price’s one-movement 1952 second violin concerto, which was lost until 2009 and never performed publicly until 2018. White’s tone was sleek and elegant, richly conveying the lush beauty of the concerto’s emotional depths and easily meeting the technical challenges of several fast passages. Lewis and the SSO were cogent collaborators.

Composer Antonin Dvorak wrote his popular ninth symphony, drawing on the same sources Lee quoted above, while he was founding director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. Lewis led a powerful reading, from a dramatic “Adagio-Allegro molto,” a magical, dreamy “Largo,” with a mellifluous English horn solo by Grace Shryock, and a boisterous “Molto vivace,” to a thrilling “Allegro con fuoco” finale. Adrian Wyard’s visual projections of American wilderness scenes above the stage gracefully enhanced Dvorak’s music.      

A rapturous audience reception of praise filled Symphony Hall at the concert ended. SSO’s next concert, “Gershwin, Berlin & Friends,” will take place on February 1, 2025.