The Honolulu Symphony is back!

Technically, it never left, but with all the financial uncertainty at the end of last season, this season’s opener felt like a resurrection. In fact, the audience gave the orchestra a standing ovation before it had played a single note.
New executive director Majken Mechling announced that she took the job “because I believe firmly that we should have another 110 years of our Symphony,” and assured the audience that top priority would be paying the musicians. The tone has shifted from “save our symphony” to determination that “this is going to be a success.”
The Symphony has not emerged unscathed, however, and it will take time to regain stability. Some 15 to 20 musicians are on leave or have taken positions elsewhere, and the decision that the season was a go came too late to reassemble those available and to fill vacancies.
To accommodate, the Symphony switched out the planned brass-heavy large opener with a lighter, winds-in-pairs piece, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No.4.
Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony balances upon the cusp between Classicism and Romanticism, belonging to one or the other depending on interpretation.
Conductor Andreas Delfs chose a Classical approach, skirting the breathless exuberance and turn-on-a-dime whimsy the music can convey in favor of a seemly and balanced sparkle – elegance over puckishness.
Coming out of summer’s turmoil and the season’s quick start-up, the orchestra will need time to settle into its stride, but there were lovely moments – the clarinet duet by James Moffitt and Norman Foster in the first movement and the viola theme led by Mark Butin in the second – and the enthusiastic audience was clearly happy to have the Symphony back.
The second half was devoted to an unusual trio of featured guests, crossover artisits Béla Fleck (banjo), who led the Flecktones last Novermber in the Pops series, Zakir Hussain (tabla), and Edgar Meyer (string bass).
The trio performed “Triple Concerto for Banjo, Double Bass, and Tabla,” composed in 2004 for Nashville, an eclectic work that draws from a wide variety of traditions, including classical music, jazz, Indian, film, folk, commercial popular, and even Bollywood. In its eclecticism and global reach, the music portends the direction classical music is headed, touching upon traditions without committing fully to any one, picking and choosing aspects to appropriate.
Although Meyer is listed as the composer, he insisted, “The three of us wrote it together.... After a while, I just attached my name to it.” Fleck joked that they have to write their own music because “All three of us play instruments that are ‘ghetto-ized’; it’s nice to be able to come out and play with everyone else.”
Structurally, the piece is not so much a triple concerto as a concerto grosso, a Baroque genre in which a small group of soloists (the concertino) play with, against, or in alternation with an orchestra (the ripieno or tutti). The Concerto also proceeds less through Classicism’s logical constructs that lead to climactic finales than through on-going discourse more like Baroque and jazz traditions, with closure arriving as the end of a journey.
Both the “Triple Concerto” and the trio performing it are probably closer to jazz than any other tradition, which the audience picked up on, occasionally applauding after solos.
Following the Concerto, Fleck, Hussain, and Meyer played three encores, and even as exciting as the Concerto was, the encores were where they came into their own style, a relaxed and fluid mélange born of these particular individuals and their musical backgrounds.
The trio’s music was vibrant, engaging, thought-provoking – an absolute joy to listen to. Each of the three is a spectacular virtuoso (bring binoculars to watch their technique), but best of all, the musicians listened and “talked” to one another through music, playing off each others’ “comments” so that the audience could follow the dialogue.
Honolulu Symphony has re-opened with a new executive director, a renewed commitment to financial stability, a crossover ensemble, a new piece, a glimpse into what “contemporary classical” might become, and a focus on communicating as an integral part of the community.
After a long summer of worrying about the future, it was good to hear the Symphony playing again.


HALEKULANI MASTERWORKS CONCERT
The Melody of Rhythm — Triple Concerto for Banjo, Double Bass and Tabla
Featuring Béla Fleck, Zakir Hussain and Edgar Meyer with the Honolulu
Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andreas Delfs
When: 4 p.m. today
Where: Blaisdell Concert Hall
Cost: $19-$70
For more information, 877-750-4400, www.ticketmaster.com or honolulusymphony.com