Tucson Weekly: Pulling Strings (October 15

The Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra brings rare music to Tucson audiences.
By Dave Irwin
IT WAS 20 years ago, and they've been going in and out of style, but the Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra (SASO) is no "lonely hearts club band." They're musicians united by their love of music.
This week the long-standing community orchestra celebrates its 20th anniversary with works never heard anywhere, much less Arizona. The program, under musical director Warren Cohen, includes two world premieres of music more commercially driven orchestras have bypassed: American composer Henry Cowell's Teheran Movement, and British composer Richard Arnell's Overture, Op. 6. They'll also offer Russian Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's rarely performed Piano Concerto, and give the Arizona premiere of a newly corrected version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Op 67. Tschaikovsky's short, haunting Serenade Melancholique will round out the ambitious program.
Review SASO was founded by musicians who just wanted to play more. At times in its history, the organization fell into stagnation; but love of music has always revived it. With its recently instituted offerings of Saddlebrooke near Oracle, it has found a supportive audience and an additional venue for its Berger Center concerts.
Now starting his second year, Musical Director Cohen has given great thought and research to the season, which will include six world premieres. Cohen admits that as a community rather than a professional orchestra, the musicianship varies. Therefore, he's had to find music suitable for the skills of his players. "Our good players are pretty good," he states. "We have a number of music teachers and other professionals. Part of what happens is that the better players help the weaker players."
Composer Cowell was still highly visible only 30 years ago, having written more than 1,000 works before his death in 1965. But time has relegated his innovative and experimental music to the sidelines, while composers he championed--like then-unknown Charles Ives and former student John Cage--found more favor. Cowell's Teheran Movement (1957) was overshadowed by his more popular Persian Set, which premiered the same year in Teheran with Antal Dorati conducting.
"Cowell tried to get performances of his work," Cohen explains, "but he was cavalier about it. If he didn't get a performance, it would go into the closet and some of those things have stayed there until this day. There were four or five premieres of his work last year, for the centennial of his birth.
"This one fit very well with what we were trying to do. He's got these open harmonies on the strings, very sustained, creating this smoky background where you get these little sounds emerging. In a sense, it has something in common with the early 20th-century idea of exotic music, but it's very much his own sound."
Arnell is considered one of Britain's best living composers, in league with Malcolm Arnold and Peter Maxwell-Davies. He wrote his Overture, Op. 6 while in America in 1940, before returning to England to a career teaching composition at Trinity College. The recently rediscovered work had actually been forgotten by its author. It's one of only two of the composer's works never performed.
"Arnell had come to the states for the 1939 World's Fair and got stuck here for the war," Cohen says. "At the time, he was a very young man living in a one-room apartment, and he started composing. One work was an overture that was very successful and performed by the New York City Symphony. Then he had other works that were successful, performed by conductors like Thomas Beecham. This work fell through the cracks because (of the popularity of) the earlier overture. Eventually, he gave it to the Fleisher Collection in Philadelphia. At some point, he lost the manuscript. The copy I'll be conducting from is unique; it's a copy made as a WPA project in 1953."
The opening theme of Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony is the most familiar piece of classical music in the world. The "Symphony in C minor, Op. 67" is also the most overworked war-horse of professional orchestras. SASO is looking to breathe new life into it, using a newly researched score.
"The standard edition of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has a number of errors that've been there since it was first published," Cohen notes. "The manuscript is available, and there's been a debate for more than 100 years about Beethoven's messy writing and whether or not he really wanted some of these changes. The particular issue was whether he wanted a repeat of the first two-thirds of the third movement. The evidence in favor of it is pretty strong. It makes sense. I think it's working very well...It was worth a try."
That sense of going past the standard repertoire to discover rare and innovative beauty in music is what makes community orchestras well worth supporting.
The Southern Arizona Symphony Orchestra, directed by Warren Cohen, performs at the Berger Performing Arts Center, 1200 W. Speedway, on Sunday, October 18. They'll perform on Sunday, October 25, at Saddlebrooke Mountainview Country Club Auditorium, 64500 E. Saddlebrooke Blvd., off North Oracle Road one mile past the town of Catalina. Both concerts begin at 3 p.m. The October 18 performance will also feature a pre-concert discussion at 2 p.m. Tickets are $8 general admission, $5 for students and seniors. For information and reservations, call 323-7166.

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