October 5 & 6, 2024
Peace Concert Hall, Peace Center
Greenville, SC – USA
Greenville Symphony Orchestra: Lee Mills, conductor; soloists: Amanda Sheriff (soprano), Sara Crigger (mezzo-soprano), Randall Umstead (tenor), Adrian Smith (baritone); Bob Jones University Chorale (Andrew Huish, director), Furman Singers (Stephen Gusukuma, director) and North Greenville University Choir (Gregory Graf, director).
Edward ELGAR: “Nimrod” from Enigma Variations (1899)
Rodrigo Cicchelli VELLOSO: Fanfare for a New Beginning (2017)
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN: Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus (1801)
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 9 (1824)
Paul Hyde | 4 NOV 2024
The charismatic young conductor Lee Mills has given the Greenville Symphony Orchestra a big shot of adrenaline, bringing new excitement to the 77-year-old institution. Audiences are responding enthusiastically.
GSO music director Lee Mills (credit: Cicero Rodrigues)
Tickets are in such hot demand for Mills’ second program as music director of the orchestra that it added a third performance of that program. That’s a rare occurrence for the orchestra or perhaps any classical music ensemble these days.
Those upcoming performances, November 9 and10, will feature Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” Suite. The orchestra commissioned Broadway writer and director Mark Waldrop to create a new narrative for Peter and the Wolf with updated language and local South Carolina references. Waldrop also wrote an entirely new narrative about two children on an adventure in the woods to be read with the “Peer Gynt” Suite.
With his energetic podium presence, Mills made a rapturously applauded debut as music director with the orchestra in season-opening performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at Greenville’s Peace Center, October 5 and 6.
Mills, 37, was appointed music director in May following a wide-ranging three-year search. He succeeded Edvard Tchivzhel, a Soviet defector who led the Greenville Symphony for almost a quarter of a century.
The Oct. 5 opening concert was more than an exhilarating performance. It was a joyous expression of community unity and resilience after the devastation of Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm in South Carolina’s history, claiming 49 lives in the state and leaving an estimated $11 billion in damages in its wake.
The Upstate, the region of the state most impacted by the storm, needed these concerts to go forward, but it was a wonder that the orchestra could muster the considerable musical resources necessary to perform Beethoven’s towering choral symphony.
The performances occurred a mere week after Helene pummeled the Upstate on September 26-27, and thousands in Greenville County still lacked power, and many roads remained blocked by fallen tree limbs.
But the show went on and the Peace Center was packed with a near-capacity crowd. The Ninth Symphony is often reserved for a celebratory occasion, so the program could hardly have been more ideal to mark the beginning of Mills’ tenure and the recovery from Helene. Choruses from Bob Jones University, Furman University, and North Greenville University joined the orchestra for the concerts.
The October 5 opening concert began, however, with a poignant surprise. To honor the thousands affected by the storm, Mills led the orchestra in Edward Elgar’s noble and elegiac “Nimrod” movement from the British composer’s Enigma Variations. It was beautifully shaped by Mills, who drew warm, burnished playing from the strings.
Two other works were included in the program’s first half: Fanfare for a New Beginning by the Brazilian composer Rodrigo Cicchelli Velloso and Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus. Both were crisply rendered.
On the podium, Mills favors big gestures, sometimes seeming briefly to become airborne.
the combined Bob Jones University Chorale (Andrew Huish, director), Furman Singers (Stephen Gusukuma, director) and North Greenville University Choir (Gregory Graf, director) peform Bethoven’s ‘Sumphony No. 9’ with the Greenville Symphony Orchestra led by Lee Mills. (credit: Derek Eckenroth)
Following intermission, Mills led a vigorous performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, notable for observing the composer’s brisk, though much-debated, tempo markings. This gave the performance an electrifying headlong momentum.
Mills’ approach to the symphony might be called thoroughly classical, favoring the energetic tempos observed by period-style conductors such as Roger Norrington and John Eliot Gardiner. The opposite camp is represented by such conductors as Wilhelm Furtwangler and Sergiu Celibidache, who offered a far more Romantic and expansive approach that can add 20 minutes to the hour-long work. (These strikingly different interpretations are all available on YouTube.)
Mills brought a rugged power to the first movement, full of storm and tension. He conducted the buoyant second movement with chiseled clarity.
The third movement is the one many conductors have wanted to stretch out far beyond Beethoven’s tempos. Mills, however, established a moderate pace, which took nothing away from the movement’s famous nobility and grandeur.
In all of his symphonies, Beethoven sets out a problem in the first movement to be resolved in the finale. By including Friedrich Schiller’s ode “To Joy” in the Ninth, Beethoven expressed a vision of unity, democracy, and happiness intended, as the poet said, to embrace the world.
I was worried that the young voices from local university choirs would not have the vocal power one expects in the Ninth Symphony. I need not have worried: The three combined choirs sang the work with both ample heft and admirable precision.
That was all the more impressive because Mills set near-breakneck tempos. There were a few passing moments where orchestral-choral cohesion was not ideal, but on the whole, the finale came off splendidly. With a clear beat, Mills took pains to keep the massed musical forces unified. All sections of the orchestra performed well; the string playing in the third and fourth movements was exquisite.
L_R: Amanda Sheriff, Sara Crigger, Lee Mills, Randall Umstead, and Adrian Smith. (credit: Derek Eckenroth)
The concert featured four fine soloists: soprano Amanda Sheriff, mezzo-soprano Sara Crigger, tenor Randall Umstead, and baritone Adrian Smith. The soloists marched onto stage right before they were to begin singing — a unique hair’s breadth approach that left some hearts pounding. I particularly enjoyed Sheriff’s luminous soprano. Smith, of course, was the first to sing the famous ode melody, and he did so with a resonant baritone. Umstead sang the tenor solo with aplomb but was covered by the men’s chorus and orchestra in the solo’s final measures.
Mills brought the symphony, with its transcendent dream of universal brotherhood, to a thrilling, triumphant conclusion. It was a welcome poetic and musical message after a devastating hurricane and a highly divisive election season.
Storms come and go. Humanity and great music endure. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Greenville Symphony Orchestra: greenvillesymphony.org
- Lee Mills: leemillsconductor.com
Read more by Paul Hyde.
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