Maestro passing the baton
By Frank Mustac
For many attending Saturday's Fairfax Symphony Orchestra concert, the performance by the county's premier classical music ensemble must have been bittersweet.While it is a pleasure to watch Maestro William Hudson expertly at the helm of the orchestra he has served as conductor and music director for the past 36 years, the performance was the last concert in the orchestra's Masterworks Series that Hudson would ever lead.
The audience at George Mason University's Center for the Arts freely offered several standing ovations and rousing applause for extra curtain calls during a program that included the music of Debussy and Prokofiev, with guest violin soloist Elmar Oliveira playing Max Bruch’s "Scottish Fantasy."
The maestro is retiring at the end of the current season. He will conduct the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra for a final time on June 14, also at the Center for the Arts, for a concert titled "Ellis Island: The Dream of America" by Peter Boyer, inspired from immigrant oral histories.
"He is an extraordinary person," said orchestra marketing director Catherine Smith. "He took this orchestra from being a group of talented community musicians who love to play together, to a fully professional orchestra.
"He has really made us what we are today," she said of Hudson, who lives in Vienna, was born in Newport News, and studied in Philadelphia and at Yale University, where he was a member of the conducting staff.
In between, Hudson played clarinet and conducted in a U.S. Army band. He also recently retired from the University of Maryland after serving since 1970 as professor of music, conductor of the symphony orchestra and opera, and head of the graduate orchestral conducting program.
Some highlights under Hudson's leadership since 1971, when he succeeded Harvey Krasney, include the orchestra's Kennedy Center debut in 1974 and dozens of memorable performances over the years, especially one in 1986 at Wolf Trap with the late legendary vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.
"That was a lot of fun," a modest Hudson told The Times by phone on Tuesday.
Fitzgerald, who was 69 years old at the time, was in great voice, Hudson recalled, yet was physically frail.
"She had to take my hand to walk out on stage," he said.
While Hudson seemed reluctant to speak of his obvious successes over the past 3 1/2 decades, others were quick to praise him for greatly expanding FSO's programming, education and outreach activities, and its overall level of artistic excellence.
"He has built us into a professional symphony orchestra that is a very classy, professional group," said the orchestra's longest-serving musician, violist Lisa Baltzer of Vienna.
"It is very hard for people to imagine what the orchestra was and what is has become," she said. "It's also hard to realize how far he has brought us and how much effort it took to bring up the level of playing, to attract the players that have great skill and talent, and to change the mindset from something we once enjoyed for recreation to something that is professional."
With the announcement last year of Hudson's pending retirement, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra in March 2007 commenced an intense international search for a new conductor and music director. Since then, the field of candidates has been narrowed down to six finalists, each of whom will conduct the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra for performances in this year and in 2009.
Biographies of all six finalists and a schedule of upcoming concerts can be found on the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra Web site, www.fairfaxsymphony.org .