PODCAST:

On Sunday, February 15, at 3:30 pm, Charlottesville Symphony presents a masterworks series of romance at the Paramount Theater.

TRANSCRIPT:

Ella Powell:

On Sunday, February 15, at 3:30 pm, Charlottesville Symphony presents a masterworks series of romance at the Paramount Theater. For Arts This Week, we spoke to conductor, Benjamin Rous.

Benjamin Rous:

I’m Benjamin Rous. I am music director of Charlottesville symphony. Charlottesville symphony is a combined professional and student ensemble, which is housed at the University of Virginia, but also exists independently of UVA as a separate nonprofit organization that runs a elaborate and busy schedule of outreach and education activities around Charlottesville and in the surrounding area, we partner with local artists, with national and international artists, and local organizations such as Charlottesville ballet, which I’m very proud of, and I’m glad to have been part of this organization Now for almost 10 years, next season.

Ella Powell:

Nice. Alright, so what can listeners expect at this Valentine’s weekend special?

Benjamin Rous:

When we got the Valentine’s weekend to line up to be our concert dates, I immediately thought, let’s just pile on absolutely as much completely romantic music as we possibly can, all together onto one program. It’s the most lush, the most beautiful and the most romantic music all smashed together.

Ella Powell:

Yeah, I know I was looking at the list of all the songs, and I thought it was cool. You included the Indiana Jones.

Benjamin Rous:

I love the music of John Williams, and one of the highlights of my life was meeting him and being the assistant to his 90th birthday Gala at the Kennedy Center, and being around him and his music for my whole life. Finally, to be around him in person was really exciting. I just think that he’s done so much for American music, and that he’s completely unique figure in all of music history, really. So I was thrilled to think, well, we’re doing all the love themes. John Williams has written so many love themes, and there’s this one in particular from Indiana Jones called Marion’s theme, and everybody knows it, and it’s beautiful music. They’ve heard it in snippets in the movie, or they’ve heard one little excerpt in the March, the Raiders March, which is the more famous concert piece, but most people haven’t heard the full concert version of Marion’s theme, and I thought that definitely has to go on there. So that’s part of the vibe of the second half of the show. All our concerts are separated into two halves with an intermission, and in this concert, the first half is like the love music, which is really, really happy, and the second half, kind of everything goes wrong in one way or another. For all the love themes, they come from these troubled situations. So we were talking about Marion’s theme, in particular, Indiana Jones and Marion, like, kind of a love theme, but like, it’s a pretty troubled relationship.

Ella Powell:

I also noticed that you’re performing a UVA concerto competition winner, so I wanted to ask about that, and also ask about the demographic of the symphony, like, how many students are part of that in collaboration with the community?

Benjamin Rous:

Yeah, so our basic structure is that there’s a member of the UVA music faculty, our performance faculty, on every instrument, and they’re leading those sections. And then those people teach a whole lot of UVA students, the flute and the oboe, and so they’re sitting right next to their students as their section mates. The majority of Charlottesville Symphony are student members. We have an annual concerto competition open to UVA students who want to enter and come and play their concerto, and we’re featuring our winner, Claire Yun on the Saint-Saëns piece. And that fit onto this program really perfectly. I was glad that Claire entered this piece by Saint-Saëns, the introduction and Rondo capriccioso, because it’s a really, really exciting piece, one of the most kind of flashy pieces that you could ever hear in a concert. But yeah, that’s a solo piece for violin with orchestra accompanying.

Ella Powell:

I previously did an interview with Michael Slon, who directs the Choral Society, and I think they performed either Saint-Saëns or like a similar piece. I was just curious, if you collaborate with other music societies or Charlottesville music groups to a degree.

Benjamin Rous:

Yeah. So every December there’s a family holiday concert, which is a local tradition where the university singers sing and the symphony plays, and Michael Sloan directs those concerts. So there’s the family holiday concerts, plus somewhere else. On our classics season, we share a program with University Singers, and we all put a big performance together. This past year has been the Dvorak mass, and before that, we’ve done, Mozart, Verdi, we’re together on stage with University Singers twice every year.

Ella Powell:

So where does this Valentine’s performance fall within your season’s program?

Benjamin Rous:

Outside of the family holiday concert, which is the end of the fall, we do five other regular programs each year, we’ll have, like, basically two of our master works in the fall, then the holiday program, and then three of our Masterworks in the spring, the first of which is this Valentine’s program. And again, I just wanted it to be as romantic as possible. And romantic in music has this kind of specific meaning of like, the after the classical period comes the Romantic period. So it’s a historical epoch, but in classical music, it’s actually kind of hard to nail down what really is the romantic because it means all these different things. Like, there’s these different strains of connection to other art forms in connection to nascent feelings about nationality, because countries were just kind of forming around Europe at the time. And there’s the connection to the natural world is another strain. But the main one that we’re really focusing on is what it sounds like. It’s actually about self expression. It’s actually about the most important stuff, which is like love and death. And so in this program, we’ve got both of those at once in Romeo and Juliet, for example. And again, we had both of those at once in Tristan and Isolde, which is also on this program.

Ella Powell:

So do other members of the symphony have input in songs, or is it kind of mainly your creation?

Benjamin Rous:

We do pool ideas among the whole orchestra every season. We have a shared Google doc where you can put up your ideas, and then you can plus one for other people’s ideas. And so there is like a repertoire and nomination process that we do every season with Charlottesville symphony. It’s also true that I have to finally judge what’s going to work well in our halls and with our orchestra and with the people that we intend to collaborate with, and a whole other slew of kind of boring parameters about what fits where on the season, where there are a bunch of judgments that I have to make, and there are pet projects that I have as well. Have as well. So as a music director, I program the season, and I do that with a lot of help from this repertoire nomination process.

Ella Powell:

Is there more you’d like to share about this season or your role as music director?

Benjamin Rous:

I love working with orchestras, and it is roughly as dreamy as I think most people think it might be to stand there and hear all that sound coming out, because it’s really the best seat in the house. I’m standing, I’m not sitting, but on the podium, you can really hear everything up close, in a way that is so I have to say, overwhelmingly beautiful, that it never gets old. And so I think maybe a lot of people would have the idea that looks kind of fun, and I can assure you that it is. It is also a great responsibility. So it’s not that it’s a piece of cake to do it, but it is really quite a magical experience. The other thing specifically about this Valentine’s Day program is that it’s going to be a little different from the rest of our classics concerts, because of the way that we packed all of this romantic music side by side, right next to each other. And it’s a lot of separate shorter pieces. There’s seven pieces on this concert, and sometimes there’s only two. They would be bigger and longer, like a whole symphony, but here we’ve got a lot of shorter pieces. And so my plan is essentially to host the whole thing and interact with the audience a lot more than I normally would on a classics program. Gonna be a lot more like one of our pops concerts than like our normal kind of buttoned up classics,

Ella Powell:

Join the Charlottesville Symphony on Sunday, February 15, at 3:30pm for an afternoon of romance on this Valentine’s weekend. Tickets can be found on the Paramount website. Arts this week is supported by the UVA Arts Council in Piedmont, VirginiaCommunity College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more@pvcc.edu. For WTJU, I’m Ella Powell.