Word: hro
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While the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra's performance was below par last Friday night, the chief disappointment of Henry Swoboda's final appearance conducting the HRO was the quality of the program he selected. He played the same nineteenth century music, sometimes camouflaged by the names of composers from other centuries, that has characterized his two years here: and he compounded it with real, and bad, nineteenth century maunderings...
Consider the two pieces played by Michael Flaksman '66, principal cellist of the HRO. The Vivaldi Sonates en Concert in E minor for cello and orchestra were meant for cello and continuo. They sound soupy with a full orchestra. Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 is more at home with a saxophone band than this Vivaldi is with such a lush orchestral arrangement...
...audience gave Swoboda a standing ovation. I think it was a nice gesture. In his two years here, Swoboda, who is responsible for programming, has lead the HRO far along the slick path of musical cowardice. Conceiving the HRO as a minor-league Boston Symphony, he has fed it music easily comprehensible both to the orchestra members and to audiences of the Boston Symphony type. What is so frustrating and annoying is that he did not attempt more...
...part of Harvard, the HRO has a responsibility to educate its members and its listeners, not just to entertain them. I hope that next year the officers of the HRO will urge this responsibility so forcefully on their new conductor that we will have less safe and worthless programs...
...dismiss this piece as one of the best warm-up exercises since Czerny, but that would not be entirely fair. Gerhard, a native of Catalonia, has written an incoherent suite but good ballet music, it contains some pleasant touches, as in the use of the piano. Since, however, the HRO lacks a corps de ballet, one wonders what Alegrias was doing on the program...