To the editor:

The wait is finally over — Lake Placid Sinfonietta’s 2025 season has begun, and what an exhilarating start it was.

This past Sunday’s opening concert (July 13) brought the audience a vivid palette of rarely heard gems, beginning with Erich Korngold’s Suite from “Much Ado About Nothing,” followed by Erwin Schulhoff’s “Etudes de Jazz,” and culminating in the sweeping seascape of Debussy’s “La Mer.” Each work was a musical canvas, brimming with color and imagination — like paintings brought to life through sound.

Erich Korngold, the Austrian child prodigy turned Hollywood legend, left Europe in the 1930s to escape the looming threat of war. While his early success was firmly rooted in the concert world, he went on to become one of the most influential composers in American film. He wrote music for 16 films and was nominated and received Academy awards. His “Much Ado About Nothing” music, originally written for a Viennese stage production in 1920, was an immediate sensation and later transformed into the orchestral suite performed Sunday night. Lush, expressive, and playfully narrative, the suite follows the arc of Shakespeare’s comedy with charm and cinematic flair. Korngold once said his film scores were “operas without singing” — this suite, then, might be described as a painting without pigment, yet bursting with vibrant color.

Erwin Schulhoff, another brilliant pianist-composer, began in the lush language of late Romanticism but emerged from the crucible of World War I deeply changed. A soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, he later embraced the vitality of jazz and modern dance, captivated by its raw rhythm and sensual energy. “I have an overwhelming passion for modern dance,” he once wrote to Alban Berg. “I sometimes even dance night after night with the ladies at the bar…” His “Etudes de Jazz” exemplifies this fascination — a suite of five miniature character pieces blending classical rigor with syncopated jazz idioms in dance forms. From the sly Charleston to the smoky Blues, the sultry Chanson, the dramatic Tango, and the virtuosic Toccata sur le Shimmy, this difficult piece in the Sinfonietta’s performance sparkled with wit, flair, and unmistakable joy.

The evening closed with Debussy’s masterpiece “La Mer,” a symphonic seascape as evocative as any impressionist painting. Though Debussy rejected the label of “Impressionist,” the music’s shimmering textures and tonal washes inevitably call to mind Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” or Renoir’s “Seashore at Guernsey.” The orchestra captured the ebb and flow of the sea with remarkable finesse, the colors of the soundscape shifting like light across water — at times brilliant, at others shadowed and mysterious. It was as though chiaroscuro had been applied to music, and the result was luminous.

A breathtaking opening concert — vivid, textured, and alive with imagination. Thank you to Maestro Malina and the extraordinary musicians of the Lake Placid Sinfonietta for a night of unforgettable artistry.

Jean Alper

Lake Placid