Here is the review from the critic of the Courier Press, Evansville from Steve's concert last night.

"As I was leaving the Evansville Philharmonic's last Pops Concert of the year Sunday afternoon, a friend asked me how I liked the concert. I'm sure he expected a good healthy dose of snobbery - it is rumored that I am a snob - but I just said "This was really a fun concert, wasn't it?"

He was disappointed, I can tell you.

But this was fun. Billed as a "Star-Spangled Spectacular," it was the kind of concert you might have gone to in the town park in 1920 - marches, patriotic songs, a flashy soloist and lots of fun. At this kind of concert, you come to hear the familiar, the tried and true, well-played and lustily sung.

Of course, we had the obligatory "National Emblem" march and a rousing version of John Philip Sousa's "Washington Post March." This music has the same place in America as the Strauss waltzes do in Vienna - we do them right, and no one else quite gets it.

These are marches that are meant to carry you down the street, and the good ones, like the Sousa marches, stay with you long after the music stops. They are instantly familiar to every American. I'll bet the audience could have sung right along.

Music Director Alfred Savia's program had no real surprises, and I for one was glad. This is the kind of concert where you want to hear the familiar and comfortable.

The first piece after the national anthem, Morton Gould's "American Salute," is an oddity with an arrangement of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" as a concert overture. It starts out as tense as a coiled spring, and the tension never resolves until that last note - it's an exciting, colorful piece that is the perfect curtain raiser.

There was one surprise on the program - the artistry of Steven Mead. Who knew a euphonium could sound like this? This was pure revelation; the musical version of shock and awe.

I remember the story about Johannes Brahms saying, upon hearing the Dvorak "Cello Concerto," that if he had known a cello could sound like that, he would have written a cello concerto himself. It's too bad neither Brahms nor Antonin Dvorak did a concerto for this instrument.

The euphonium, a high-pitched tuba, also is known in the U.S. as the baritone, that unloved and ignored member of the low brass section in every high school band that has only one solo in the standard repertoire, in the first movement of Gustav Holst's "The Planets."

Probably the foremost euphonium player in the world, and certainly the most prominent, Mead plays so well, so fluently, with such virtuosity that you begin wondering why the instrument has languished so long. The warm, almost vocal quality of his tone and his ability to play rapidly are every bit the match for any other soloist we have heard this year.

Mead's performance of "Variations on 'The Carnival of Venice,'" an old bandstand chestnut if ever there was one, was perfect.

Mead also played on a couple of other numbers, including Kevin Kaska's "Majestic Journey." I would like to know more about this one.

A fiery overture for euphonium and orchestra, this was a real highlight of the program. The piece sounds quite a lot like superior movie music - I was thinking of Bruce Broughton's score for "Silverado" - and thought maybe the subtitle of the piece could be "A Cowboy and his Tuba."

I'd like to hear it again.

We also were served up the Philharmonic Chorus, in fine voice, on Aaron Copland's "Old American Songs," which were unexpected and quite beautiful, and the usual rousers - "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America." Without these, it would have been a pale afternoon indeed.

The last piece on the printed program was "God Bless America," with Evansville's own Joan Moore-Mobley of the Brown Sisters filling in for Kate Smith. If you're from here, you know this lady can sing, and her powerful ringing voice was no surprise.

Of course the encore was "The Stars and Stripes Forever," complete with the chorus waving flags and the orchestra blazing away. (I couldn't follow the words the chorus were singing, but I so hope they had to do with our web-footed friends.) As a final shocker from Mead, he played the famous piccolo part on the euphonium.

In short, this was a great way to spend the afternoon. All we needed was lemonade and some straw boaters, and it would have been perfect. I would say "Bravo," but "Rah-rah, sis-boom-bah" seems more appropriate."

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2010/apr/11/spectacular-concert-displays-orchestras-stars/

William Nesmith...correspondent, Courier Press

thanks to Courier Press