One of the happiest features of musical life in greater Boston is the significant number of community orchestras here, allowing both players and audiences to experience a plethora of music, and often works that are not performed by the professional ensembles in the area.

On Sunday afternoon, I had the pleasure of hearing one of the newer such ensembles in a program of interesting, but almost entirely unknown works. The Orchestra Book Club takes its name from the literary book clubs that have existed widely for many years, allowing members to gather and share an artistic experience confronting a book they have all read. By analogy, the Orchestra Book Club encourages interested musicians to gather periodically and experience—through their own readings of musical scores—a wide range of music, familiar and unfamiliar.

Founded by Reuben Stern in 2022, the orchestra meet for these playthroughs of various works. Instrumentalists are free to play without audition, while non-playing listeners are welcome to hear the reading and take part in the discussion that accompanies it.

Periodically, the Orchestra Book Club decides to give a formal public performance of a group of pieces that form an interesting program. Such was the occasion on Sunday at Arts in the Armory Somerville where Stern led performances of three works by composers connected with Boston.

Music Director Reuben Stern got a degree in mathematics at Harvard, but also studied conducting with Federico Cortese, which led to a three-year term as conductor of the Bach Society Orchestra there. Advanced studies at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore included work with Marin Alsop and Joseph Young. These studies produced a fine conductor with clear stick technique, a good visual control of the orchestra, and an equally warm connection with the audience during the informative information about piece presented just before it was played.

“Sounds of the City: Music of Boston’s Past, Present, and Future” featured three pieces played in reverse chronological order, with enthusiastic and informative introductions from Stern. (Notably, the “future” piece was actually a work of the present, albeit with a futuristic theme.)

Yvette Janine Jackson’s Hello, Tomorrow! (2003) for orchestra and tape is essentially a soundpiece inspired by a science fiction story of the same name by George Lefferts. The composer, born in Los Angeles, now teaching at Harvard, is a soundpiece evoking a nearly barren future, perhaps after World War III, as Stern described it, with the slow, gradual reappearance of life on earth, with a sense of slow upward striving, but very gradually most of the way. One simple percussive sound long short short carries the momentum at times through the piece, while other sonorities hint at the stirring of the life urge, yet for the most part, it is a still, subdued atmospheric score.

The second work on the program was the world premiere of the orchestra version of the Piano Sonata No. 1 by Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee, who was born in Somerville and studied at Juilliard and the Mozarteum. The large piano sonata was orchestrated by her son, conductor David Rahbee, in 2020. The work is in four movements, of which the first and last are especially marked by vivid rhythmic drive. The second movement flowed with aching lyricism, and the third—surprisingly—was a brief lively dance for woodwind quintet. The composer, who was present, received a warm hand from the audience at the close.

The closing piece was the one that might have been heard previously by at least a few members of the audience, since George W. Chadwick was a significant figure, as both teacher and composer, for many years in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. But, although some of his works have achieved a reasonable popularity among lovers of classical music, Aphrodite is not yet among them, so its performance here was most welcome. It is a colorful work for large orchestra, rather on the model of Richard Strauss (Chadwick met Strauss on his visit to America and decided to write for the larger orchestra in the early years of the new century. Most of his 19^th-century scores used an orchestra of Brahmsian size.)

The Orchestra Book Club players gave a worthy account of this lush score, though the effect would have been heightened with larger string sections, especially in balancing the winds and brass. The violin and horn duet in the love scene of the score was deliciously played by concertmaster Eun Joo Ahn and principal horn Paula Limberg. It was a great pleasure to hear this rich and challenging piece live in Boston.

The diverse members of the Orchestra Book Club, amateurs and professionals alike, did themselves proud in this unusual and challenging program.

Sea related feature HERE.

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.