Maestro Michael Gesme is a man of miracles. People hearing the symphony for the first time would be surprised to know that before Gesme's appearance, it was a poorly led cluster of struggling musicians of varying levels of skill. My first eight years in Bend I would attend these sad concerts and whisper to no one in particular, "They're a great group. They ought to get together sometime."
Then Michael arrived. He was a very young man when he was hired to replace the retiring music professor who conducted the symphony. I remember him sitting in my office the first day of advising back in 1996. He was shadowing me as I showed him the process as it was done back then. I thought he was a very pleasant and extremely funny and down to earth young man.
I still think of him that way except when he's actually on the podium with his back to us. Then he becomes something very different. There is power and rhythm in his movements. His gestures with the baton send call precise responses from the musicians. He throws his whole body into music, bouncing on his feet, elbows tight to his body as he brings in sharp chords or wide as he encourages loftier tones. The everyday Michael is very different from this performance powerhouse compressed into a potent and compressed Midwestern package. That's another miracle -- that change.
The Maestro, of course, was hired as a teacher. You may not know that the symphony is actually a class at COCC. Back in the day, the "students" -- what you would call the musicians -- had to pay for the class in order to play in the symphony. Fortunately, the board of the Central Oregon Symphony Association came up with a way for the Association to pay for the classroom seats. (I'm not sure whether or not Michael lead the way in this action.)
Over the years of Michael's tenure in his position as Maestro, he's lead the Symphony to a level of performance one might imagine unlikely in an orchestra of amateur musicians.
In the late nineties, I always assumed Michael would go on to head the Oregon or even the Cleveland orchestra. But instead he's stuck to having a happy life in our small beautiful city, sharing a good life with his lovely talented wife and beautiful talented children, all of whom play in the symphony. All of that when he could have gone on to be miserable in a higher status position. Go figure it.
Tonight's Central Oregon Symphony Concert featured four superbly performed short pieces (two of which I'd not heard before) and Dvořák's Symphony #5 in F Major. Three of the pieces performed before the intermission featured spectacular young musicians. Una Wagner, a high school junior from Redmond, sang two short arias, one from the baroque Xerxes by Handel and the other from Mozart's Don Giovanni. She did a nice job with the acting and her voice was sweet, if not yet powered by adult lungs.
But my favorite moment of the evening was the astonishing work by 13 year old John Fawcett playing the violin solo part in the first movement of Edouard Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole. Oh. My. Goodness! There he was up on stage in his black slacks and red satin shirt and tie, face clenched in concentration, slamming out an absolutely stellar performance. Yeah, yeah. I know he's been in the symphony for year. I know he's a child prodigy. But I didn't really know, ya know? And this piece just sold it. WHERE IS MY JOHN FAWCETT VIDEO!!!!????? The only recording I found of him on Youtube is a kind of painful piece from his youth (age 9) where he's playing with some folks who aren't doing as well as he is. Or you can wait for a few more years and then catch him on Performance Today. (Picture from Cascade Classical Music Foundation)
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