The West Virginia Symphony

10/05/2007

The title may conjure up a mental picture for some of you: perhaps some of you will see in that picture a bunch of people dressed in coveralls and flannel shirts with straw hats chewing on a stem of grass or big wad of tobacco.  Perhaps you can picture them sitting on milking stools playing instruments like banjos and harmonicas, comb kazoos, maybe even a washboard or a wash-tub base fiddle.  This scene of a crowd of hillbillies playing music from Deliverance and Hee Haw is pretty funny but oh so far from the truth.

The Nancy and I were given tickets to see The West Virginia Symphony in concert right here in Beautiful Downtown Berkeley Springs (aka Town of Bath), population 711.  A couple of times each year the Symphony, now in its 68th year, goes on a road show of sorts.  This year the Symphony chose little Berkeley Springs as the venue for its on-the-road concert.

This was a first for both of us.  I had never been to a concert of this type or this quality.  I was amazed by the whole thing, nearly left speechless by both the skill and talent exhibited by the orchestra, and most definitely by the quality of the music and the sound picture painted by the musicians’ instruments.  It was as if I was in a dream.

I have always found it quite easy to get lost in the story line of a book, as if I were actually and literally sucked into the story and the scenes.  I found this to be true of the Symphony, as well.  I was taken up by the beauty of the music and lost in a melodic trance – an out of body experience.  We listened as the orchestra took us on a voyage of Romantic Masterpieces by Wagner, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff, and were both saddened as the last notes were played, but nonetheless invigorated as we left the auditorium.  We cannot wait to do this again, but next on our list, I think, is an Opera.  We hillbillies ain’t nothing but uptown.

And that is all I have to say about that…