A compelling reading of an important 20th-century organ concerto was a highlight Sunday afternoon (Nov. 23) of the opening concert of the 2025-26 season by The Symphonia, an event that made the most of its strings-only makeup with interesting repertoire choices.
The concert, held at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church right behind Mizner Park in Boca Raton, was led by the chamber orchestra’s now-official music director, the Anglo-American conductor Alastair Willis. The organ soloist for the concert was the church’s music director, Timothy Brumfield.
Brumfield and the Symphonia teamed up for the Organ Concerto (in G minor, FS 93), by the 20th-century French composer Francis Poulenc. Completed in 1938, the concerto — scored for organ, strings and timpani — offers performers and listeners the mature Poulenc: A deeply sensual fund of melody, references to the ancient music of the Catholic Church (which Poulenc had recently returned to after a crisis of faith) and a feeling of insouciance and bravado signaled by surprising shifts of mood and unexpected dissonance.
Brumfield has a hugely powerful organ at his beck and call in St. Gregory’s loft, and he made sure that the audience knew it, with a bone-shaking opening of the concerto that rattled the sanctuary and led the hands of some listeners to fly upward to their ears. But the sheer volume of his initial entry was not the chief feature of his performance. Rather, Brumfield played this exciting and quirky work with sovereign command, showcasing its many shifts of register and tone with winning musicality.
For its part, the Symphonia played with expert ensemble, carefully matching their music to the soloist, who was high above the floor in the back of the church while the orchestra performed from the space just before the altar. But the critical thing in this piece is the contrast between the seven sections of the one-movement work; here, the Symphonia’s strings dug into their role as equal partners in the music, not acting just as providers of interim entertainment between organ statements. The audience could hear all the elements of Poulenc’s style at their fullest, which is really the only way to understand this concerto.
The Poulenc was the final work on Sunday’s program, which opened with a fresh selection: The American composer Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica Celestis, which the composer arranged in 1991 from the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1. Beginning in a slow-moving, serene A major, the music gradually speeds up into driving scales and contrapuntal motion before returning to the mood of the initial pages with increased intensity and then a very quiet coda. Inspired by Kernis’s study of medieval music, particularly that of the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, the work echoes Hildegard’s unworldliness but also her spiritual energy in a tonal format of virtually no dissonance and rich, soothing string harmonies.
The Symphonia played Kernis’s piece with precision, giving it the weight it deserved. Willis’s direction was equally precise and his interpretation tasteful, though the resonant acoustic of St. Gregory’s obscured some of the more delicate details of the score, particularly at the end. Still, it was a fine repertory choice for this ensemble, and one that surely proved an introduction to the music of one of the United States’s most prominent contemporary composers.
The Kernis was followed by a well-worn canonic staple, the Serenade No. 13, K. 525 (1787), of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, better-known as Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Willis, an ebullient performer who provides running commentary for each of the pieces on the program, suggested that it might be perhaps the second-best-known classical work in the world, behind the Beethoven Fifth Symphony (the orchestra underlined this point by playing the first couple bars of the symphony).
The Mozart was perhaps most adversely affected by the acoustic, which often made the music sound muffled. Nevertheless, it was a good reading of this very familiar work, with all of Mozart’s melodic charm and compositional wizardry engagingly on sonic display.
The well-attended concert closed with an encore: the Air from J.S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 (in D, BWV 1068), known since a famous violin arrangement in the 1870s as Air on the G-String. The arrangement here was for strings and organ, and it sounded sweet and lovely, as it always does.
The string orchestra contingent of The Symphonia is a strong ensemble on its own, with admirable intonation and sectional unity. With the Kernis and the Poulenc opening the group’s 21st season of concerts, Willis showed that fresh repertoire is one of the best ways to optimize the appeal of a regional chamber orchestra.