by Kelly Dean Hansen, special to the Times-Call

Conductor Robert Olson has literally pushed the musicians of the Longmont Symphony to their breaking point this year.  The four regular classical subscription concerts have all featured immensely challenging modern works.  Saturday's regular season finale at the Vance Brand Civic Auditorium of Skyline High School continued and intensified this trend.  All of the pieces on the program were written by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, the two greatest exponents of the French Impressionist movement in music.  This repertoire is notoriously difficult, as much from an interpretational standpoint as from a technical one.  Olson did indeed ask much of his orchestra for this concert, and they responded, as always, with a heroic effort.

Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" perfectly set the mood of the evening.  The flawless flute solos of Kay Lloyd highlighted an appropriately sensitive interpretation of this delicate piece.  The string section also responded with appropriate warmth.

Maurice Ravel's jazz-influenced and abundantly colorful Piano Concerto in G Major anchored the first half of the program.  Pianist Mark Wait, a one-time CU faculty member, joined the orchestra in a thrilling and intense performance that was rewarded with an enthusiastic audience ovation.  The piano part is certainly exciting, but this concerto is unusually difficult for the orchestra, which functions as far more than a mere accompaniment.  Indeed, the orchestral color, dominated by virtuosic writing for the wind players, is essential to the concerto's character.  The Longmont wind players delivered accurate and crisp readings of their many difficult solo passages and matched Wait's virtuosity admirably.  Wait's finest moment was certainly the long solo passage at the beginning of the Adagio movement, although the ending of that movement failed to completely preserve the spirit of the magical opening.

The second half of the concert featured Debussy's orchestral "Nocturnes."  The first two of these provided more clean and evocative orchestral playing.  In the third, "Sirènes," the orchestra was joined by a small wordless women's chorus from the Longmont Chorale, whose entries were appropriately understated and did not draw undue attention to themselves.  A couple of minor glitches at the end of "Sirènes" did not significantly affect the overall brilliance of Olson's rendition of the score.

In the end, Olson was merciful to his orchestra, replacing the originally scheduled "La Valse" by Ravel with the composer's more familiar and less difficult "Bolero."  Here, Olson made an obvious point of "conducting" as little as possible and allowing his individual players to have their moments in the spotlight, which was in fact one of Ravel's goals with this piece.  While "Bolero" features solo passages for almost every instrument, the person who really makes or breaks the work is the snare drum player, who must present the same rhythmic pattern with no interruptions for the entire length of the piece.  CU graduate student Jennifer Dorris was assigned this role, becoming in effect a proxy conductor.  Her gradual increase in volume and intensity was flawlessly executed, and the audience rewarded her with an enthusiastic ovation that seemed to take her by delighted surprise, and certainly made it worth her sore forearms.

The evening was a triumphant conclusion to a memorable season in which the Longmont players more than justified Olson's ambitious choices of repertoire, a trend which will certainly continue next season.  Olson returns to the Brand Auditorium on May 8 for the annual Pops concert, the Symphony's concluding event.  The orchestra will present three short classical works, and then be joined by prominent Denver jazz/blues singer Hazel Miller and her band.  They will play orchestral arrangements by Wayne Scott of jazz standards.  For tickets and information, call the LSO box office at (303) 772-5796 or visit www.longmontsymphony.org.