The upcoming Tacoma Symphony Orchestra concert will be the last TSO concert of its season and it is warming up to be an ender on a high note ... a high C actually. Pardon the musical humor. The concert will be the season capper for its musical director, who is marking a milestone as he sets to wave his baton. Harvey Felder will be marking his 15th year with TSO, and he has seen the symphony grow from its shaky infancy, through its awkward but rightfully proud adolescence and now into young adulthood.

TSO was formed when there was no Museum of Glass, Tacoma Art Museum was located in a converted bank. There was no UWT and the Washington State History Museum had just opened. There weren’t a lot of arts programs.



“It looked pretty bleak,” Felder says.



Felder was the artistic brains behind the operation and helped orchestrate its change from an all-volunteer gathering of talented but semi-closeted musicians to a professional orchestra. That effort not only feed OFF the growing arts community in Tacoma but helped feed INTO it, so that all arts programs grew by supporting each other in the minds of the community. The orchestra has gone from playing musical standards, wonderful and melodic but standards nonetheless, to branching into hollowed ground in the musical world.



“We are playing from the A list,” Felder says.



This 15-year milestone concert, for example, will mark the TSO performance debut of Maria Sampen, who is the head of the string department at the University of Puget Sound School of Music. She has received UPS’s Thomas A. Davis Teaching Award for excellence in university teaching. She was recently appointed to the faculty of the Brevard Music Festival in North Carolina and will teach and perform there this coming summer.



The concert will include three works, Ravel’s “Bolero,” Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D, which Sampen will perform. 

“Ravel’s ‘Bolero,’ Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures’ and the Tchaikovsky concerto are three of the greatest and most beloved works in the orchestral repertoire,” explains Felder. “These pieces will together make an exciting, electrifying program that will be a great way to end the season.”



Premiered in 1928, “Bolero” is most famous for its use in such films as 10 and the Italian animated movie Allegro Non Troppo. It features an ostinato snare drum rhythmic figure against two alternating melodies with an ever-shifting palette of instrumentation.

Mussorgsky composed “Pictures at an Exhibition” in 1873 as a set of pieces for a solo piano, each one depicting a different drawing at an exhibition of works by the late Russian artist Viktor Hartmann. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D of 1878 is one of the best-known and most difficult of the violin concerti.



It’s concerts like this and the energy from the community and the musicians that have kept Felder waving his baton during his decidedly “Tacoma style” concerts.



“We make it an event instead of just something where you sit quietly in the dark for two hours,” he says. “We have fun.”



[Pantages Theater, Saturday, April 19, 7:30 p.m., $10-$75, 901 Broadway, Tacoma, 253.272.7264]