| Capital City Symphony (DC)
I went back to Washington DC recently for a friend's sixtieth birthday. She and her husband and I had all been at Georgetown University together as undergraduates and had remained fairly close over the last forty years. It was a very elegant, warm affair, and the next day more of us old-timers got together with our old drama prof (who now runs DC's National Theatre) for another evening of libation-fueled reminiscing.
Then, on Sunday afternoon, I went by myself to a children's concert of the Capital City Symphony. The CCS is the current version of the Georgetown Symphony Orchestra that I founded as a freshman at Georgetown, and conducted from 1967 to 1971. In 2006 the Symphony left the University (for a variety of reasons) and finally found a new home at the Atlas Arts Center (a converted movie theatre) across town in Northeast Washington. Now under its fourth music director, with a major board and budget, the CCS, while still a community orchestra, borders on near-professional playing.
My first concert with the Georgetown Symphony was supposed to have been April 5, 1968 - the day after Martin Luther King was shot. Washington, of course, was up in flames and the concert had to be postponed for a month or so. How appropriate is it now, forty years later, that the Symphony has a home in center of "the corridor" that still shows the ravages of those events.
There was one violinist Sunday who had been with the orchestra all forty years. He had started out while a student at the GU Dental school, met his wife (also a violinist) in the orchestra and raised a family of three young musicians. We shook hands and reminisced and he showed me his violin.
"Captain Gilbert sold me this violin. He told me, "Save your money, 'cause I'm going to sell you my violin when I stop playing. And keep saving your money, because next year I'm going to sell you my bow."
Capt. Gilbert must have been in his seventies when I was conducting (he's the violinist closest to the bass drum in the picture). He was a true Southern Gentleman and rabid George Tech alumnus, who lived in Georgetown with his beloved wife Edith and drove a Rolls Royce the few blocks up "O" Street from his mansion to Gaston Hall on the GU campus where we rehearsed. Although I didn't ask, I'm willing to bet that whatever he charged for the violin wasn't even close to its market price. It's a very good fiddle.
Before going back up onto the stage to join the other musicians, he told me he planned to sell the violin to one of the younger players in the orchestra when he stopped playing. "This violin belongs with this orchestra," he said.
They played a program about water for the children's concert: Handel's "Water Music," Alan Hovhaness' "And God Created Whales," Smetana's "Moldau" etc. Not easy stuff - and not condescending for children. And, as I said, they play it well.
I've had little do do with the Orchestra since leaving in 1971. I went back in 1989 to conduct at the GU Bicentennial (and that was almost twenty years ago!). They've done it. They've kept Captain Gilbert's violin playing in the orchestra. I might have started it all, but they've kept it playing. Remarkable.
Sign in to disble this ad
| 
