BRATTLEBORO — In the second concert of its 45th season, the Windham Orchestra, under the direction of Hugh Keelan, invites audience and players to a concert that he says is a great opportunity for inspiration and participation.
Keelan is asking string players from all traditions to come and play with the orchestra in a performance of a piece he calls “a sublime masterpiece for massed strings”: Vaughan Williams' “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.”
Keelan also wants wind and brass players to join the orchestra for what he calls “one of the most alive, vigorous, and entertaining works ever written,” Percy Grainger's “Lincolnshire Posy.”
“We promise that to be on the inside of this sound is an experience you will never forget, a turning point for a musician whatever your accomplishment level or age,” Keelan says.
On Friday, Jan. 23, at 7:30 p.m. at Kurn Hattin in Westminster, and Sunday, Jan. 25, at 3 p.m. at the Latchis Theatre, the orchestra presents “English Delights.”
This program is a celebration of things English, but not necessarily in the way you might think. Although the works being performed are mostly on British themes, and Ralph Vaughan Williams and Edward Elgar are indeed English-born, Percy Grainger is of Australian birth.
Even with Elgar, often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but rather from continental Europe.
In addition, the Windham Orchestra will perform the world premiere of a thoroughly American composition, a piano concerto by Jacob Mashak, who was born in Vermont and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. For this piece, Keelan hands his baton to Mashak and plays piano.
Here it is Keelan, born in England, who furnishes the British connection.
Mashak's “Concerto for Piano and Winds” was written for the Windham Orchestra and Keelan.
For this season, Keelan has programmed each of the orchestra's four concerts to include a world premiere from someone who has local connection with the area.
Mashak is a composer, conductor, and performer who has also taught composition and trombone at The Putney School. Among his distinctions he has written the longest work for piano on record, the 11-hour-long “Beatus Vir” for two pianos.
Other notable works include “Unsent Domestic Letters,” which premiered with John Malkovich as speaker; “Vita Nuova” for one-mallet marimba, written for Jane Boxall's “0 to 8 mallet project” and premiered with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble in Montpelier in 2013; and “Music for Windham,” an improvisational work for the Windham Orchestra, musical park benches, local schoolchildren, and audience in 2012.
In writing about his process in composing his new work, Mashak called it “my first mature concerto, and I had to discern what it means for something to be a concerto and, more importantly, what it means for me to write a concerto.”
He explained he eliminated the string sections from the orchestra, leaving only the winds and percussion. Each is therefore a soloist, “which places the pianist not so much as one in front of a unified group but as a single element of a community exposed, in front of, and among peers, where each individual voice of the community is valuable and every person has a singular and vital role in the performance.”
Keelan says he finds this concerto to be a work that goes through a complex range of moods, from the dramatic to the more introspective.
Keelan says Williams' “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” has “a lovely, slow arch … [it is] heartbreakingly beautiful.”
He continues: “Although Vaughan Williams was an agnostic, many people see this piece as a vision of the sacred at its most transcendent,which produces for its listeners an elevated state beyond the day-to-day realities.”
The work is performed solely with strings.
“We are getting together as many string players as we can to play the piece,” Keelan says. “Even the former conductor of the Windham Orchestra, Zon Eastes, will join us for this one.”
The Windham Orchestra will be doing two works by “that wonderful eccentric Percy Grainger,” Keelan adds.
In addition to being a composer, Grainger was a notable collector of folk songs, and he uses these songs as a basis for his “Lincolnshire Posy,” according to Keelan.
“[Whereas] in the Vaughan Williams [piece] we highlighted strings, in this work we will spotlight our wind players,” he adds.
The second piece, “Handel at the Strand,” is a work Keelan says he finds boisterous, adorable, and “real fun.”
“And I don't mean just classical-music fun. I guarantee you that people will be smiling,” he says.
The final work of the program is one of Elgar's “Pomp and Circumstance,” but it's not the one inevitably performed at graduations.
“It will be a grand finale, for here we are bringing together the strings and wind and members of the community,” Keelan explains.
Keelan says he wants to make this winter concert a true community event. By asking members of community to join the orchestra in the performance, he says, he hopes to reach people who do not normally find themselves at classical music concerts. The Windham Orchestra already welcomes participation from students from Kurn Hattin, Brattleboro Union High School, and Bellows Falls High School.