Orchestra makes music come alive

When I was a little girl, my family had an old 78 rpm record player. I had to stand on a chair to be tall enough to lift up the lid and put on a record. Maybe my parents and my younger sister used it from time to time, but I don’t remember it. I was the one who got out the heavy record albums and spent hours playing music.

My parents signed me up for a children’s record club, and every month one of a variety of records arrived, but the records I loved best didn’t come from the club. They were “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” “I’m a Little Teapot,” Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor and his Sixth Symphony, the “Pathétique,” and a recording of Oscar Levant playing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Let’s just say I had eclectic tastes in music.

The Tchaikovsky my father had picked up from a hospital that was getting rid of broken sets. The theme I loved best from “Pathétique” was on a record with a chunk broken off the edge as if someone had taken a bite out of it. I had to manually place the needle past the broken part to play it. Never mind. I was willing to do that a hundred times to hear Toscanini conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

I don’t know where “Rhapsody in Blue” came from, but I can still remember the black-and-blue album cover. Over and over I loaded the heavy 78s onto the record changer and lost myself in Gershwin. 

Somehow it had not occurred to me that I had never heard “Rhapsody in Blue” live until I heard it played by the Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra. I loved the whole concert, but I have no words to express what I felt when this music I loved as a 6-year-old came to life in Francis Auditorium and again the next week at First Presbyterian Church in Waynesboro. It was stunning.

I don’t care how much you pay for a sound system, live music is a different experience. It resonates throughout your whole being, especially the big sound of a symphony orchestra. Pianist Anna Maria Mottola brought this music to me physically. Just as I will never forget my young self dropping heavy discs onto a record player that magically transformed them into Oscar Levant playing Gershwin, I will never forget the two performances of the Waynesboro Symphony. Peter Wilson, the conductor, and Mottola may be back in Washington where they live, but they are not completely back in Washington. The WSO is in my head playing glorious music. I heard it when I woke up this morning and I can hear it now.

We are so fortunate to have an orchestra that gives college students and local people the opportunity to play symphonic music. I wish every schoolchild could have the chance to hear an orchestra. In my elementary school our teachers plied us with filmstrips in preparation to walk 10 minutes to the high school gym to attend a performance of the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra playing Dvorák’s Symphony No. 9, the “New World Symphony.” A half century has passed, but I still remember.

I think next time the Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra plays, I should grab a kid and take her with me. Maybe when I am long gone, she will be telling people, “I will never forget the first time I heard a symphony. It was more than 50 years ago, but I still remember. It was quite a thrill.”

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.