Symphony Tunes into Tall Stacks

(first published in The Cincinnati Post Oct. 14, 2003)

The Cincinnati Symphony tunes into the city’s Tall Stacks Festival with an all-American program including Mark O’Connor’s "The American Seasons."

Tall Stacks, Cincinnati’s steamboat extravaganza featuring a visit by 17 spectacular stern wheelers from 13 cities, steams into town Wednesday through Sunday. With it comes a lot of music - 75 acts in all, a feast of Americana including Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ricky Skaggs and B.B. King.

But the Ohio riverfront isn't the only place to hear "roots" music during the newly named Tall Stacks Music, Art and Heritage Festival.

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which manages Tall Stacks as part of its subsidiary Music and Event Management Inc., is staging its own American celebration at 11 a.m. Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday at Music Hall.

Guest artist is violinist/fiddler/composer Mark O'Connor who will perform his own "The American Seasons," a folk/jazz/blues infusion for violin and string orchestra modeled on the classical concerto.

Also on the program are early 20th-century composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes' impressionistic "The White Peacock," Fantasy for Trombone and Orchestra by Paul Creston (1906-85) featuring CSO principal trombonist Cristian Ganicenco and the ballet suite from "Fancy Free" by Leonard Bernstein. Guest conductor is Michael Morgan, music director of the Oakland East Bay Symphony and the Sacramento Philharmonic.

Seattle born O'Connor, 41 - national fiddling champion, busy session musician in Nashville (where he performed on more than 500 albums) and protégé of jazz violinist Stephane Grapelli -- is a crossover phenomenon. He won a Grammy in 2001 for "Appalachian Journey," a Sony release with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and double bassist Edgar Meyer that included O'Connor's own compositions. His output also includes six violin concertos, the most recent having been premiered in August at the BBC Proms in London.

"With my music, I'm blurring the boundaries," he said by phone from his home in San Diego.

"My first musical training was classical, but my two greatest mentors were Benny Thomasson, the great Texas fiddler, and Stephane Grapelli, the great jazz violinist. I sort of grew up being influenced that the violin was a fiddle and the fiddle was a violin.

"Obviously, the physical nature of the instrument is not different (he plays on a Vuillaume violin)."

O'Connor's musical instruction began at age 5 on the classical guitar. "My mother was a big violin fan, but for some reason she wanted me on guitar. So, it's kind of funny I ended up with the violin."

He won a classical guitar competition when he was 10. "Then I was beginning to see violin players on television, including fiddlers. That's when I asked my mother for a violin. I kept up both for many, many years."

One of his first violin teachers encouraged him to try fiddling. "She had been to the national fiddling championships and when she saw me take to the fiddle tunes really fast, she told my mother, 'I want him to enter the little kids contest at the national.'" He won (he was 12). At 17, he won the national championship.

O'Connor studied with Thomasson in Seattle, where the Texan had retired. "I liked the style of Texas fiddling and it was also a really popular style to play in competitions." He began composing as a young teenager.

Blending styles was his own idea, said O'Connor, "although I did take cues from my teachers. I don't necessarily do it the way they do, but what they did spoke to me fairly loudly. Stephane Grapelli, for instance, was a classical violinist by training who listened to American jazz and a gypsy guitarist named Django Reinhart.

"At the time he met Django, he was playing tango music from Argentina. He grew up in Paris in the 1920s, so he was influenced by French art culture. Even though I have a different set of influences, mostly American, in some way we're sort of the same animal."

O'Connor toured with Grapelli as a young professional. "That's when I got a lot of mentoring," he said.

Composing is what got him into classical circles. "I started composing concertos and caprices and string trios and quartets. That sort of led the way for me to be able to play with all these great classical musicians." (He premiered his Concerto for Two Violins with violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and the Chicago Symphony in 2000.)

"American Seasons" was inspired more by Shakespeare than Vivaldi, he said. "Of course, I've loved Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' forever. I think because of that I didn't think of doing something like that." When he was offered a commission for a work on the seasons, he initially turned it down. Then a cousin who is a Shakespearean actor introduced him to "Seasons of Man" from "As You Like It."

"All of a sudden the floodgates started opening. Within a week or two I was completely interested in doing the project."

The concerto has four movements keyed to the "seven ages" of man: "Spring" (birth and early childhood), "Summer" (adolescence and young adulthood), "Fall" (maturity) and "Winter" (old age and death). O'Connor views it as an American life at the dawn of the 21st century, with swing rhythms in "Summer," the Irish reel (his ancestry) in "Winter" and a touch of acoustic steel-string guitar.

Through his music, his playing and his internationally recognized Fiddle Camps in Nashville and San Diego where he and an outstanding faculty teach a wide range of fiddle styles, O'Connor is trying to "differentiate the American school of violin playing from that of other countries.

"There's Russian, German and French, right? But there's not an American school of string playing. I think what I'm doing is a part of what that could be."