Riverdale musicians invite famed composer to hear his own work

By Jason Fields

Riverdale has a history with classical musicians, conductors and composers.

Composer Béla Bartók lived on Cambridge Avenue and Arturo Toscanini — the famed conductor of the Metropolitan Opera and the NBC Symphony Orchestra — made his home at Wave Hill and in a mansion where SAR Academy now stands.

People unfamiliar with the work of the maestro can go to Apple’s iTunes or another online service and download the work of a man who died long before the advent of the Internet, in 1957.

Now, 52 years after Toscanini’s death, another great conductor and composer is coming to the neighborhood, this time to hear his own work performed by the Sinfonietta of Riverdale under the direction of Mark Mandarano.

“The piece is hard to put in a nutshell,” Mr. Mandarano said, speaking of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Mania,” which will be performed at Riverdale Temple on Sunday, Dec. 6. “It’s a very difficult, really spectacular part for a cellist.”

And the cellist who will be playing the part is Wilhelmina Smith of Riverdale, who performs regularly with the New York Philharmonic.

“I’ve had a couple of experiences performing with him and playing his music,” Ms. Smith said. Ms. Smith was a guest principal cellist for Mr. Salonen, when he was the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Speaking of the piece the Sinfonietta will play, Ms. Smith painted a dynamic picture.

“It’s called ‘Mania,’ and I think it’s an apt description. It’s incredibly difficult,” she said. “It contains a lot of inner struggle within it. It gets frantic.”

Ms. Smith said she has worked on her part for months.

The Sinfonietta of Riverdale is an idea conceived of by Mr. Mandarano, who is married to Ms. Smith. The couple has two children in local schools.

“The idea for us was to put out the best music we possibly can,” he said. “People have responded joyously to it.”

The audience for the performances, which began in January of this year, has steadily grown.

“The audience is really representative of the changing dynamic in Riverdale. We have our seniors come and we love our seniors. They’ve already got an appreciation of classical music,” Mr. Mandarano said. “We also have young families.”

Students have also made the trip to Riverdale Temple to hear the music.

“It can open their eyes to what this kind of music can be,” he said.

And Mr. Salonen’s music offers an insight into how diverse the orchestral canon can be.

“There’s a really eye-catching array of percussion instruments. Enormous Eastern gongs, each turned to different pitch. [Percussion is] an intergral part of this performance,” Mr. Mandarano said. “It adds quite a bit of color to a colorful piece.”

Mr. Salonen, who is in New York to conduct From the House of the Dead at the Metropolitan Opera, will have a front-row seat.

Mr. Salonen is comfortable sitting and listening to his own work being conducted by others.

“It gives me a lot of pleasure to witness a new generation of conductors performing these pieces,” Mr. Salonen said in an interview. “I tend to do first performances myself. When fantasy becomes reality, there are always some surprises.”

The piece to be played by the Sinfonietta is “a constant metamorphosis. It’s like a huge thing that eats everything that’s put in front of it. It’s a constant rebirth of the same material,” he said.

The second piece to be played on Sunday is Gustav Mahler’s “The Song of the Earth.”

It’s all part of a plan to bring Riverdale together, adding to the sense of community and culture, Ms. Smith, the cellist, said.

“Something like this could create a reverse commute to Riverdale,” she said.

 

Want to see the show?

Tickets are available at http://sinfoniettanyc. org/purchase.html, and are $35 ($25 for seniors and Riverdale Temple members, $15 for students). The concert starts at 2:30 p.m.

This is part of the December 3, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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