Lara St. John was almost dancing while she was playing Astor Piazzolla's "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires" with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra Friday night.
Small gestures — a subtle weight shift from hip to hip; a little bounce as she stepped left, then right during the sometimes blistering "Primavera Porteño" (Spring) movement and again in the spirited "Verano Porteño" (Summer) finale.
No one could blame the Canadian violinist who now calls New York home for being a little bit excited if not downright giddy. While she has performed a couple of recitals and concerts with small orchestras in recent months, her concert Friday, Sept. 24, at Tucson Music Hall was her first full audience and orchestra concert since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020.
Canadian violinist Lara St. John joined the Tucson Symphony Orchestra on Friday for the first of two Tucson concerts.
Hopefully she and TSO Music Director José Luis Gomez could forgive us our lapse of concert etiquette. Seems most of the audience of 900 at Friday's concert applauded at every pause, including the end of movements in "Seasons" and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in the second half.
The biggest applause of the night, not surprisingly, came before a single note was played. With little prompting from Paul Meecham, who took over as TSO president and CEO in May, the audience left their cushy new Music Hall seats and gave the musicians a prolonged standing ovation.
"Tonight is particularly special because it marks the return of live performance after an 18-month pause," Meecham said, eliciting another round of robust applause.
Friday night did indeed feel special and new and glorious in that sort of first-day-of-high-school kind of way. We were all butterflies and high expectations, with a healthy dose of nerves fed by 18 months of silence and isolation and worry over the COVID-19 pandemic.
And then we were there, standing in line near the now running fountain in the historic Eckbo Plaza, presenting vaccination cards and IDs to the very patient crew who looked just as happy as we were to be back.
Friday's TSO concert felt like a homecoming, not only for the orchestra — whose members, like the audience, donned mask — but for the audience.
Inside the hall, joyful reunions as people recognized one another through face masks before the house lights blinked and the orchestra members, also masked, sat a little taller in their chairs.
For as much as we in the audience had been anticipating this, surely that paled in comparison to what the musicians were feeling on that stage.
But it was evident once they started playing. There was a rush of excitement mingled with a sense of measured abandon from the opening The Star Spangled Banner — a time-honored tradition that starts every TSO season — to the breath-stealing finale of the Tchaikovsky.
Taking their cue from Gomez, fresh from his European pandemic exile with a short haircut and shiny wedding ring, the orchestra took us on an exotic musical vacation that pit-stopped in Hollywood's early days with William Grant Still's brassy and cinematic "Festive Overture," then dropped us into an Agentine town square for Piazolla's tango take on Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons."
While the bassists played pizzicato, creating a thump, thump that sounded like tango dancers stomping to the rhythm, the strings, under Concertmaster Lauren Roth, imitated a squealing crowd with slightly dissonant chords played by bowing upwards across the strings.
By the time they got to the Tchaikovsky, it felt as if the orchestra was determined to make up for the 18 months that it was away. The Fourth Symphony is a perfect vehicle for that, opening with clarion horns, woodwinds and trumpets playing the Beethoven-esque intro with a sense of controlled urgency.
That energy and passion never waned throughout the 40-minute symphony, even as the melody quickly unfolded from the frenetic intro to the melancholy mood carried out by the oboe in the second movement. Pizzicato strings brought out a playful theme that's repeated by the winds before the triumphant finale that kind of summed up our journey to get to Friday night. The ending is frenetically paced from the strings to the brass to the percussion. There's flashes of heart-racing drama tempered by moments of reflection — the tinkle of a triangle ever so faint and soothing — that give way to cascading energy that gets your heart to racing again.
Tucson Symphony Orchestra Conductor José Luis Gomez returned to the podium at Tucson Music Hall Friday night for the orchestra's first concert since March 2020.
It was thrilling and frightening, and in the end kind of life reaffirming. Through chaos, music brought us light and reminded us of everything we had missed over the past 18 months and what we will likely never again take for granted.
