The orchestra’s season opener demonstrates the ensemble’s crowd-pleasing accessibility and internal cohesion.
“Imagine” is the one-word thesis statement behind the Johns Creek Symphony Orchestra’s 2025-26 season. It’s a bold but simple invitation that opens itself up to a smorgasbord of possibilities. In the case of the orchestra’s September 20 concert at Mount Pisgah Church, its first with newly confirmed director Henry Cheng, the imagining was cinematic in nature.
Violinist Holly Mulcahy, the incumbent concertmaster of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and Chattanooga Symphony & Opera, was the night’s featured soloist, performing The Rose of Sonora, her five-part concerto created in collaboration with film composer George S. Clinton, who was on hand to provide the work’s narration.
Written as the soundtrack for an imagined cinematic experience, The Rose of Sonora leans heavily on spaghetti western pastiche as it tells of Rose, a Wild West outlaw who springs her lover Jed from jail. They steal away into the mountains with a hefty gold boodle, only to be robbed by a rival band of marauders. Jed is killed in the skirmish, leaving Rose to exact revenge in a thrilling climax. It’s a simple outline, but one full of Hollywood ambience.
From a conceptual standpoint, The Rose of Sonora generally hits its mark: Westerns and their stylistic conventions are so deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious of modern moviegoers that any audience can easily be carried off in mental imagery of cactus blossoms, long-barreled six-shooters and silhouetted vigilantes disappearing into the sunset. The concerto wears its influences on its sleeve, Aaron Copland and Ennio Morricone outstanding among them. The melodies may be original, but it’s instantly familiar stylistic territory as we feel the ecstasy of all that gold.
Where The Rose of Sonora falters is in trying to bridge the gap out of soundtrack territory and into the classical concert proper. To that end, the presence of a solo violinist hinders and helps, depending on the scene at hand. The second movement, “Love and Freedom,” makes great use of the melodic violin lead: It’s a tender, reflective romance theme that benefits from a principal melodic voice guiding the moment. The melancholic “Death and Healing” works well in a similar light.
By contrast, the principal violin feels like a disjointed distraction in movements like “Ambush.” These grand-scale epic moments don’t need a wildly arpeggiating lead phrase on top of all the thunder and fury, especially when the ensemble is in full-fledged orchestra-as-foley-department soundtrack mode, delivering gunshots and horse hooves in pounding cacophony.
Through it all, however, were the Michael O’Neal Singers, whose pristine vocal tones cut through the symphony with arresting clarity. They more than any other facet of the evening’s performance gave Rose’s heroic ride the victorious majesty it needed.
After the intermission, Johns Creek Symphony Orchestra president and string bassist Peter Hildebrandt emerged to call attention to the orchestra’s ongoing push for a large-scale public performance space in Johns Creek. There is a $40-million bond initiative coming up for a vote on November 4 that will fund two-thirds of the construction, with the rest provided by city grants and the private sector. The performance hall was a passion project and personal goal of the late JCSO founder J. Wayne Baughman and, as Hildebrandt noted, it would further serve the numerous Johns Creek arts organizations that are forced to perform outside the city or in suboptimal venues.
The evening’s second half was made up of all 14 parts of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. In stark contrast to the theatrics of Sonora, this is an introverted work of internal examination that moves into more avant-garde conceptual territory. Written at a time when the composer was ambivalent about his musical career, it features 14 variations on a theme, with each dedicated to different special persons in his life, including his late wife, professional colleagues and the various salt-of-the-earth friends that made up Elgar’s world. It is a deeply personal piece and one that served as a natural response to the first half’s preceding bombast.
Through it all, the evening was a successful realization of the JCSO’s penchant for injecting crowd-pleasing accessibility into the normally erudite formality of the classical world. Newly arrived conductor Cheng is a passionate dynamo on stage whose infectious charm and unrelenting enthusiasm fueled the night throughout.
There’s something at work in the JCSO that puts it head and shoulders above other community orchestras. Somehow, it has a sense of tonal balance and internal cohesion that surpasses other ensembles at its level, and the result is a consistently satisfying listening experience even as it pushes back against suboptimal performance conditions. (Mount Pisgah, for all its messianic grandeur, isn’t quite the right space for a full orchestra.) Let’s hope they get that performance space — it would be the ultimate jewel in an already luminous crown.
Written by Jordan Owen