First Impressions by T. Stephen Wager

Fenimore Chamber Orchestra Begins Concert Season in Style

The beauty of a mid-summer afternoon beneath dreamy azure skies was the scene for the opening concert of the season by Fenimore Chamber Orchestra. The musical selections inside Christ Church in Cooperstown worked fully in tandem with the gorgeous weather outside. Maestro Maciej Żołtowski began the concert with the overture to Haydn’s “Armida,” another rarity offered as part of what is already an expected practice by this very stylish orchestra.  Considered to be Haydn’s finest opera, “Armida” enjoyed a very brief revival in the early 1980s, when the artists appeared sur scène to do proper vocal and dramatic justice to the opera. Since then, the overture has enjoyed something of a life of its own with connoisseurs. The overture is in three parts and generally adheres to the principle of sonata form. The performance showed from the beginning a faultless legato as well as fleetness and virtuosic playing, not only from the strings but the winds as well, in the extremely demanding third part, perhaps foretelling of Armida’s decent into the underworld at the end of the opera. One could certainly believe so, listening to this performance!