For Junior Family Weekend, Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra Outstandingly Performs Sibelius and Haydn

As part of its 211th season, the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra performed for a sea of visiting parents at the Junior Family Weekend Concert on March 2 in Sanders Theatre. Featuring Haydn’s penultimate symphony and a particularly stunning rendition of Sibelius’s third symphony, the performance was well-balanced and powerful.

The orchestra highlighted the sprightly stylistic and structural innovations of Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 3 in C major, Op. 52, including dramatic passages of austere chaos that contrasted with moments of full euphony. In the first movement, Allegro moderato in C major, the cellos and contra basses provided a strident, rhythmic melody. The woodwind solo over the brushing strings was bucolic and jostling. Plagal cadences, underscored by the timpani, strongly advanced the movement’s growing contrapuntal and apocalyptic tension.

After the pulsing, folkloric nocturne in the second movement roared the breathtaking last movement in Moderato, which Sibelius once described as "the crystallisation of ideas from chaos." The sonorous blare of the trombones, along with rough strokes and rubbery pizzicatos of the strings, blended discordant melodies as if ravaging them with hurricane and anarchy. Welded beautifully, waltzing in and out of the pervasive darkness, the orchestra marched in a compendium of the chorale theme towards the piece’s purposefully anticlimactic end.

The orchestra also performed Joseph Haydn’s penultimate Symphony No. 103 in E-flat Major, Hob I: 103 (“The Drumroll”), which staggered in its onset but technically sharpened as the piece progressed. The evening began with an imposing, deep-resonating rendering of the eponymous kettledrum cadenza. Undernourished and lacking character, the bassoons, cellos, and double basses were off to a rocky start with slips and tangles in the sepulchral, medieval-like “Dies irae” introduction, but the violins’ precise articulation made up for the other strings’ difficulties. The first violins in particular, led by Principal Jeremiah L. Blacklow ’20 and Assistant Principal Cherin Lee ’22, performed with a robust intensity, with every sinewy texture crisply defined. After the vivacious Allegro con spirito first theme, an uplifting Ländler-ish sweet pastoral theme glowed with resonance. The opening drum roll’s fanfares returned, and the movement concluded somberly.

The menacing Croatian-folk military variation of the second movement, with the charming woodwinds answered by the strings, began with a drooping, imperious march. Aside from some intonation mistakes, stressful blunders, and rushed residue in the concertmaster’s supposed-to-be florid first violin solo in the third variation, the movement was beautifully integrated. Following the lovely trio section, which featured a graceful arabesque for clarinets in the swaggering Menuetto, the finale in agile rondo began with a shaky traditional French horn call, which extended with different parts blending in a relentless unity, gracefully lilting in a waltz, evincing unassuming calmness, eventually culminating in a sparkling, triumphant close.

For the first time this season, the event was entirely student-run. Conductors Gordon V. Ma ’19 and Reuben A. Stern ’20 led with stirring enthusiasm. HRO’s performance proved to be a delightful highlight of Junior Family Weekend.