Lloyd Webber's Requiem Lives Again

Charles T. Downey, At Castleton Festival, a take on 2 composers
Washington Post, July 22, 2013

Barber, Violin Concerto (inter alia), J. Ehnes, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, B. Tovey

Somewhere in between the operas at the Castleton Festival, Lorin Maazel takes his Festival Orchestra out for a spin. At a concert on Saturday night in the Festival Theater, Maazel led his young musicians, most of them talented conservatory students, in a comparison of two 20th-century composers, whose careers showed that accomplishment and acclaim do not necessarily coincide.

The program opened with Samuel Barber’s overture to “The School for Scandal,” the comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It was Barber’s first piece for orchestra, composed in 1931, when he was about the same age as most of Maazel’s players and still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. This solid, fun performance captured the piece’s bubbly joy and its youthful brashness, with some pretty oboe and English horn solos for good measure. [Continue reading]

Castleton Festival Orchestra
Dmitri Berlinsky, violin
Lorin Maazel, conductor
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Requiem Mass