Symphony to celebrate 70th year
Clifton J. Noble, Jr.
Published in the Republican, September 13, 2008
September 13, 2008

Founded in May 1939, the Pioneer Valley Symphony enters its 70th year of music-making this season with "Celebration," and music director Paul Phillips marks his 15th anniversary at the helm of this venerable community orchestra.

Phillips and the PVS launch their celebration on Sept. 20 with Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 2, William Perry's "Six Title Themes in Search of a Movie," and Brahms' Violin Concerto, featuring Northampton-born Erin Keefe as soloist.

The City of Northampton has proclaimed the week of Sept. 15 to 20 as Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus Week to honor the organization's years of contributing to the cultural life of the Valley, and it has proclaimed Sept. 20 as Erin Keefe Day to honor this superb violinist.

For Keefe, who has returned only once to perform in recital in Northampton since her departure for the Curtis Institute in 1998, Sept. 20 marks a triumphant musical homecoming, complete with an impressive array of accomplishments; her receipt of a 2006 Avery Fisher Career Grant, top prizes in several international violin competitions, and collaborations with the leading lights of classical music, including the Emerson String Quartet, and pianists Gary Graffmann, Richard Goode, Menahem Pressler, and Leon Fleisher.
"My parents have traveled to hear me a lot," Keefe said in a recent telephone interview from her Upper West Side Manhattan residence, "so they're very excited that I'm playing in Northampton, just a mile or so down the road!"

During her education at Curtis and at the Juilliard School, Keefe has studied with some of the legends of American violin playing, including Arnold Steinhardt (of the Guarneri Quartet) and Ida Kavafian, but she said that the teacher with the longest-lasting influence on her musical life was Philipp Naegele, emeritus professor of music at Smith College, with whom she studied during her high school years.
"Philipp was always very honest," Keefe said. "He has very high standards, and he told me what I needed to do to make it in the music business, but also taught me to play the composer, not to play yourself - to understand the score, and not be swayed by the prevailing trends in the performance world. When you're a teenager, these things don't have as much of an impact, but with greater experience and perspective, I've realized the importance of his teaching a lot more."

Naegele, interviewed at his Northampton home, remembered the time he spent teaching Keefe as "three wonderful years."
"She is a totally natural talent," Naegele said. "She has an incredible speed of learning and memorization, is an incredible sight-reader, and has been fortunate not to have had any serious technical detours.
"She is an intuitive, natural musician," he continued, "and on the instinctive level she does everything right. She is blessed with excellent nerves and has gone straight for top competitions from Japan to Poland, very often on short notice."

During the 2007 Torun International Violin Competition in Poland, Keefe played the Brahms Concerto that she will play on Sept. 20 twice, once as a competitor, and the following day as the Grand Prize winner.

Naegele recalled his first encounter with Keefe.

"I went to a performance at the Smith College Campus School," he said, "and all the first graders were sitting on the stage, playing, and I looked over and saw Erin's bow arm and I thought 'Ah, someone who knows how to use the bow!"

When preparing new works for performance Keefe still comes back to Northampton to play them for Naegele and to learn from his comments. Most recently she previewed the Prokofiev First Violin Concerto for him before performing it with the New York City Ballet..
Naegele also praised Keefe's recital marking her 2006 reception of the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant. "She played absolutely perfectly," he said.

Sept. 20 marks the world premiere performance of American composer William Perry's "Six Title Themes in Search of a Movie." Perry was born in 1930 in Elmira, N.Y., and began composing and conducting at the age of 15. He studied at Harvard with Paul Hindemith, Walter Piston, and Randall Thompson, and served as music director and pianist at the New York Museum of Modern Art, where he wrote more than 100 film scores to accompany the museum's silent film collection.

The witty, provocative titles of Perry's six themes follow.
1. Dance Overture from "Wild Nights in Toronto"
2. Waltz from "The Raincoats of Dijon"
3. SereNade from "Angelus for an Angel"
4. March from "The Bridge on the River Platte"
5. Blues from "The Black Marigold"
6. Sirius Finale from "Voyage to the Dog Star"

Opening the concert with the most substantial of Beethoven's three "Fidelio" Overtures, Phillips and the PVS announce yet another season driven by the kind of fascinating, eclectic and exciting programming that attracted the attention of Symphony Magazine this year, resulting in the profile "Big Dreams, Big Sounds" (March to April 2008).
For a community orchestra founded in a cabin on top of Shelburne Mountain, gathered formally by Greenfield native Harold Alexander Leslie (who five years later would found the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, which celebrates its 65th anniversary this season), and praised in the New York Herald Tribune by the noted composer/critic Virgil Thomson for "admirable" playing of a "distinguished" program, the 70th anniversary is an auspicious occasion, and a true cause for "Celebration."

Violinist welcomed home in 'Hamp
By Clifton J. Noble Jr.
Published in The Republican
September 22, 2008

NORTHAMPTON - The Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra opened its 70th anniversary season Saturday evening, presenting a concert called "A Musical Homecoming" to a packed house at the Academy of Music.

The "homecoming" in the title referred to the return to her native city of violinist Erin Keefe as soloist in the Brahms Violin Concerto. From her earliest lessons in Northampton with Rose Lander to stellar high school performances guided by Smith College Professor Philipp Naegele, Keefe demonstrated the makings of a world-class violinist.
Now a graduate of the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School with an international career underway and an Avery Fisher Career Grant in her bouquet of laurels, Keefe has exceeded the highest expectations. Her performance of the Brahms Concerto on Saturday mixed equal parts of patience and passion.

Producing a glorious sound across the fingerboard, from banked fires on the low G string to the angelic altitude of the E, she played with both beauty and intelligence, coloring single pitches so as to illuminate their function within Brahms' masterful harmonic architecture as well as their position in her exquisitely etched melodic phrases.

Such playing, incorporating the mind and heart in similar measure, is the hallmark of the greatest classical artists. Coupling that technique and understanding with a winning persona and nerves of steel, Keefe clearly has a brilliant career ahead of her.

Maestro Paul Phillips, celebrating his 15th year as music director of the PVS, shaped a welcoming, supportive sound world for Keefe's eloquent playing. Balancing orchestra and soloist with nimble subtlety, Phillips crafted a musical partnership that embraced without consuming, encouraged without pushing, and commented without overshadowing.

In his 15 years with the orchestra, Phillips has become known as a fascinating programmer. Saturday was no exception, as he brought his audience the world premiere of American composer William Perry's delightful "Six Title Themes In Search of a Movie."
Born in Elmira, N.Y., in 1930, Perry studied with Paul Hindemith, Randall Thompson, and Walter Piston at Harvard. For 12 years he served as music director and composer-in-residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he wrote and performed scores to more than 300 silent movies.

His "Six Title Themes" delivered a bumper crop of enjoyment, spanning styles and eras of American light classical and cinematic music with almost embarrassing ease. If Leroy Anderson and John Williams put their heads together over blank manuscript, something like this piece might have been the result.

Perry's direct melodies, good humor, and skillful scoring charmed everyone in the house with "Dance Overture from Wild Nights in Toronto," "Waltz from The Raincoats of Dijon" (featuring Mary Tokarski as a strolling accordion player), "Serenade from Angelus for an Angel" "March from The Bridge on the River Platte" (a sort of football fight song with a whistling orchestra and a Stars-and-Stripes-type piccolo trio), "Blues from The Black Marigold" (featuring fedora-topped alto saxophonist Thomas Nasiatka), and "Sirius Finale from Voyage to the Dog Star" (featuring soprano and PVS Chorus director Lisa Jablow and some Rachmaninoff-esque piano playing from Larry Schipull).

Phillips and the PVSO launched the evening with a solid, stirring account of Beethoven's "Leonore Overture No. 2." The confidence and commitment with which the Pioneer Valley Symphony performed on Saturday is both a glowing testament to the investment of players and leadership alike in the creation of great music, and a source of the ensemble's health and longevity.