Trumpeting in the season
Symphony’s opener features challenging piece by horn player
Last February, when newly hired Columbus Symphony principal trumpet player Mark Grisez made his debut with the orchestra, Music Director Rossen Milanov was pleased with what he was hearing.
“We were so happy to have him,” Milanov said. “He’s just a star — he’s a top player.”
But Grisez’s introduction to symphony-goers was curtailed: The trumpeter had gotten just two concert programs with the symphony under his belt when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“Then we all stopped working as we were all figuring out what the future of
things were going to be,” said Grisez, 27, a native of Fresno, California, who trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Rice University in Houston and, prior to his hiring in Columbus, played with organizations including the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida.
Since then, Grisez, who was hired to fill the slot left by former principal trumpet player George Goad, has had to settle into his new position at a time when the symphony’s plans changed dramatically because of the pandemic: In lieu of its traditional lineup of Masterworks concerts, the symphony has assembled in smaller, distanced groupings for outdoor, outreach or limited-capacity concerts.
Yet Grisez hasn’t minded straying from the concert hall during the pandemic. In fact, the outreach concerts allowed him to better connect with the community around him — in a different way.
“Being a member of the orchestra is more than just the playing,” Grisez said. “That human dimension of really connecting with people, and having a verbal conversation as well as musical ones, is the stuff that really gives the performances that we give in the Ohio Theatre a whole lot more depth.”
Audiences eager to hear Grisez’s trumpet skills in a more traditional setting will have ample opportunity this weekend in limited-capacity concerts Friday and Saturday in the Ohio Theatre: In concerts capped at 300 specta
tors per performance, the trumpeter will perform J.S. Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 2,” a work regarded as so formidable, he said, that many in-house instrumentalists decline to perform it.
“Many principal trumpet players will have it in their contract that they will not play this piece because of how physically demanding it is,” Grisez said.
Milanov, who got the program together midseason, was aware of what he was asking of the new hire.
“In some cases, Bach asks the trumpet to play even higher than a flute, so you could imagine the register and the demands,” Milanov said. “I said, ‘Mark, I know that this is not a piece that you could do only on two months’ notice.’ ...
He said, ‘Just give me a day. I will think about it.’ I called him the next day and he said, ‘Yeah, I will do it.’ That’s on less than two months’ notice — that’s amazing.”
Not that Grisez is boasting.
“I don’t mean that in any way to say, ‘Oh, look at me — look at how special I am,’” Grisez said with a laugh. “It’s a very, very fun and exciting piece.”
The performance is the first of a series of just-announced, limited-capacity concerts that will conclude the symphony’s season in June; the concerts follow an initial batch of limited-capacity concerts that proved successful with music-hungry patrons.
“Those concerts were technically sold out by our capacity numbers,” Milanov said. “We got a lot of enthusiastic response and grateful letters from people saying how important it was for them to have that piece of normalcy — coming to the theater and hearing the orchestra perform live.”
During the concerts on Friday and Saturday, the symphony — comprised of about 45 musicians — will also perform the “Holberg Suite” by Edvard Grieg and “Symphony No. 5” by Franz Schubert. The jubilant tones of the latter inspired the overall title of the program, “Schubert’s Welcome to Spring.”
“It’s one of those beautiful, sunny pieces that doesn’t have even an ounce of a cloud passing,” Milanov said. “Everything is just so connected to nature, to regrowth, to rebirth.”
For his part, Grisez is happy to share a milestone in his career with a community he has gotten to know during the past year.
“It’s a landmark in your life to be able to play something like this,” he said, “and share it with other people.”
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