Reviews

Saturday night in Oak Ridge, a double string quartet was doing its best to go about the routines of daily life while gunshots rang out in the percussion and the rest of the orchestra seemed to be teetering on chaos.

Will a composer’s new music hold up for the long term? If popularity with audiences is one of the criteria, then conductor and composer Lucas Richman’s brand new “Concerto for Piano and Orchestra: In Truth,” certainly qualified.

…is certainly the work of a confident composer. It is also original, thought provoking and intellectually intriguing. If there has been anything heard recently that deserved a standing ovation, Richman’s concerto and DeAlmeida’s performance, was it.

“Richman’s nuanced writing for DeAlmeida captured the touching program of his concerto, namely of a youth finding strength in spirituality, represented by Psalm 23. Gorgeous writing for the oboe treated […]

“The Holocaust has become one of the most frequently invoked catalysts for composition in the 20th century–and now, beyond. It is also one of the most problematic. The risk of […]

“The writing in Mr. Richman’s Oboe Concerto is very well suited to the oboe. The flowing melodies are very attractive and fit the lyrical and melancholic tendencies of the oboe so nicely. […]

“They were also involved in the next piece, Reindeer Variations by Lucas Richman…This set of variations, based on the names of Santa’s reindeer, was a little less serious but confirmed […]

“We were prepared to chuckle, but we weren’t prepared to hear so many delightful variations of orchestrations: sometimes melodic with exquisite grace; sometimes playful as in sparkle; sometimes jazzy and […]

“Richman opened the concert with one of his own works, An Overture to Blanche, an 11-minute concert expansion on part of his incidental music for the recent Clarence Brown Theatre production […]