Review: ‘Pasadena Symphony Warms to New Music Director’

Brett Mitchell stands in front of the Pasadena Symphony’s home, the Ambassador Auditorium. (Photo by Tim Sullens)

PASADENA — San Francisco Classical Voice has published a review of Brett Mitchell’s recent subscription program with the Pasadena Symphony:

A new era began at the Pasadena Symphony this season with the arrival of Brett Mitchell as music director… Mitchell is only the sixth music director in the band’s 97-year history, an impressive record of longevity and continuity in a business that typically sees much more turnover at the top…

Judging by the orchestra’s solid performance on Saturday, Jan. 25, at Ambassador Auditorium — the third subscription concert of Mitchell’s inaugural season — the organization is in competent professional and musical hands. An engaging communicator who has already forged a congenial rapport with both the musicians and the audience, Mitchell, who formerly led the Colorado Symphony, created an informal and welcoming atmosphere for this eclectic program of works by Jessie Montgomery, Florence Price, and Mozart. It will take time, of course, to judge Mitchell’s musical vision for the orchestra, which has in the last few years been staging a strong recovery from financial strain and the COVID shutdown.

In brief remarks, he acknowledged the devastating impact of the terrible fires that recently ravaged nearby Altadena and parts of Pasadena and paid tribute to first responders and fire department personnel who had been invited to attend. A heartfelt, if glacially slow, performance of Samuel Barber’s funereal Adagio for Strings followed, an appropriate addition to the scheduled program. “America’s semi-official music for mourning,” as NPR writer Anastasia Tsioulcas has called it, this arrangement for string orchestra of the second movement of the composer’s 1936 String Quartet, Op. 11, has been heard after many tragic occasions.

Another work for string orchestra, Montgomery’s exuberant and cheerful Starburst, cleared the air. Montgomery has said that this energetic curtain-raiser lasting just a little over three minutes is meant to “create a multidimensional soundscape” inspired by the dazzling birth of new stars, represented by jabbing unison string lines and a pulsing rhythmic undercurrent. The Pasadena Symphony strings rose to the occasion…

To read the complete review, please click here.