Music director and conductor Anthony LaGruth addresses the audience at a Livingston Symphony Orchestra concert.
As it sometimes goes with community orchestras, programming sticks to symphonic bread-and-butter. If Dvořák is on the program, it is “From the New World.” If it is Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. If it is Mozart, the “Jupiter.”
Maestro Anthony LaGruth has his own way of doing musical things at the Livingston Symphony Orchestra and it starts with strong program-building. “We try to keep it interesting,” he says. “That’s kind of our calling card.
“Audiences will appreciate Beethoven’s Third and of course the Fifth. They’ll go gaga for the Ninth. They’ll appreciate Mozart for the fact that they’ve been told in school he’s such a genius. But when they get to hear works by Shostakovich, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky like we’ve done in the past, it’s going to have a different impact.”
As the Symphony’s music director and principal conductor of 10 years, each season he comes up with a new and interesting theme. This year’s is “The Color of Sound,” to be featured at five concerts from October to June at Heritage Middle School in Livingston.
ANTHONY LaGRUTH
He will emcee each one and dig into every piece’s orchestration and instrumentation to demonstrate how it impacts the color of the sound.
The 2025-26 season will kick off Oct. 25 with a tribute to Hector Berlioz, a French Romantic composer of orchestral wizardry who used forward-thinking instrumentation and vivid orchestral color.
“Berlioz was really the first great orchestrator,” LaGruth says. “He brought in so many different and auxiliary instruments into the orchestra, and also used traditional instruments in new and revolutionary ways. Without him, we would not have had the music of Liszt, Strauss or even Mahler. All of those phenomenal composers cite Berlioz as a strong influence in their music.”
The program, “Hector Berlioz: Inside the Score,” will open with the Roman Carnival Overture, “a short little work that’s peppy and very much Berlioz,” LaGruth says.
It will be followed by Symphonie fantastique (1830), a radical fantasy about an artist consumed by passion and jealousy that Berlioz based on his obsession with Harriet Smithson, an actress he married three years later. Across all five movements he uses reoccurring leitmotivs for the characters that he called idée fixe (French for “fixed idea”).
LaGruth will pull them apart and show how they change in color and instrumentation over the course of each entrance, “and how Berlioz’s different uses and choices influence the emotional response we have at the time that each unique appearance occurs.”
Berlioz wrote almost exclusively for natural and specialized brass instruments, and LaGruth will contrast the differences in the sounds against modern instruments that use pistons and valves.
“In this piece, Berlioz has four horns, and they’re each pitched in three different keys and change in each movement,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons why his orchestras were always so big. The natural horns, obviously, were limited in scope with what notes they could play, so in order for him to traverse the keys that he wanted to traverse, he had to have instruments available in several different keys so that he could fill out these harmonies.”
Most of Berlioz’s orchestral (and operatic) compositions were written on a massive scale, which created balance issues from the large numbers of wind and brass instruments involved. He would remedy this by using lower brass instruments, including the 19th-century ophicleide, a predecessor to the modern tuba.
Ideally, LaGruth would have the rare instrument on hand to show concertgoers the differences between the two, but he hasn’t been able to find anyone who has one. “I’m not giving up yet!” he jokes, and says he’ll ring up The Smithsonian Institution, which has one in its collections.
LaGruth says there are many rewards in mounting these types of monumental and dramatic masterworks: It creates an enriching experience for the audience and challenges the musicians, especially the brass family in “fantastique.”
“Community orchestras rely on the willingness of their local players to come every week and rehearse, and if you’re doing Mozart and Haydn, or maybe even Beethoven, you’re not really giving much reason for your brass players to show up. Because they want to play! They don’t want to just toot on a couple different notes and go home.”
Another lively program for the brass to sink their teeth into will be “The Sound of Red, White, and Blue.” The concert, Feb. 22, will celebrate America’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with an all-American roll call.
ANTHONY LaGRUTH
Works by lesser known composers Morton Gould and Russell Peck will be paired with iconic and classic works including George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” and John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Gould was a conductor and a prolific arranger of orchestral programs in radio. The concert will feature his American Salute, a patriotic fantasia from 1943 based on the American Civil War chestnut, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
Peck’s two selections — Jack and Jill at Bunker Hill and The Thrill of the Orchestra — were written for narrator and orchestra, and were designed to introduce emerging audiences of all ages to the inner workings of an orchestra.
“In ‘The Thrill,’ we talk about what the instruments are, what they’re doing, and how they sound when they play loud and soft, and when they play together,” LaGruth says. “It is sort of a modern equivalent of Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’ with the narration aspect.
“But what is interesting about Russell is that he was a bit of a rock music aficionado so his orchestral music sometimes comes across with this sort of hard driving energy of ’60s and ’70s rock ‘n’ roll.”
The Symphony traditionally schedules a free family discovery concert every season. LaGruth is fond of the educational repertoire and calls it “edu-tainment.” Last year’s edition was called “Who Needs a Conductor?” and the performance went through all the different things a conductor does and doesn’t do, and how they influence the performance.
“It was like a glimpse behind the curtain and the audience responded well to that,” he says. “I always try to bridge the gap between people who know absolutely nothing about why they’re at the concert and the people who have been listening to this music their whole lives. There is always something somebody doesn’t know, and I always try to find that something.”
Another way he bridges new audiences to classical music is through Garden Fresh, a program he created three years ago to platform living composers. It is open to artists of all ages enrolled in New Jersey universities and composers who are native to the state. Every year the Symphony chooses a new score and presents it as a world premiere.
“My philosophy is that every new piece should get to be played once,” LaGruth says. “And these composers can now put something on their resume that actually says ‘I’ve had a performance with an orchestra’ instead of just having their piece read in a lab orchestra. The musicians get challenged by playing new music that has just been written, so we get to keep abreast of the latest idioms, and the audience gets to hear something that no one else has ever heard before.”
It is rare to find a community ensemble that takes up the challenge of commissioning new works themselves. The process needs funds and co-commissioners. “If I had a couple extra thousand dollars to throw around, I would happily commission a new piece of music,” LaGruth says.
The Symphony takes an amiable, middle-ground approach to contemporary classical music. The works are adventurous and well-crafted, and not the stuff written by radical, atonal firebrands.
“A lot of times people are concerned they’re going to hear some quick, crazy, Lord-knows-what kind of sound, but most of the music is just not that way,” LaGruth says. “And even when we do venture into pieces that begin to approach that sound, I explain to the audience why a composer will choose to have that kind of harmonic language.”
PATRICK J. BURNS
This year’s Garden Fresh awardee is Patrick J. Burns, a New Jersey native who is an adjunct faculty member at Kean University and Montclair State University. He and LaGruth have known each other since they were music students. (LaGruth has earned degrees in conducting and composition at MSU and Ithaca College.)
Burns’ Adagio for Orchestra will be played at “The Color of Nature” concert, April 11. “He writes a lot of music for community and school band, but not so much for orchestra,” LaGruth says. “But he’s a default for Garden Fresh because he’s a great composer and an excellent educator.”
The second half of the program will feature Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony from 1899, the “Titan,” based on his Songs of a Wayfarer song cycle.
Other contemporary American works will receive Symphony premieres at “The American Symphony” concert, Dec. 13. Both Amy Beach and Howard Hanson were popular composers of their time but are seldom heard today.
Beach’s Symphony in E minor, the “Gaelic,” was written in the traditional symphonic structure but is embedded with Irish melodies in homage to her ancestry. When it premiered in 1896 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, it became the first symphony written by a woman to be performed by a major orchestra.
Hanson was the longstanding director of the Eastman School of Music in New York. His Symphony No. 2, the “Romantic,” “is both tuneful and appealing in a straightforward way,” LaGruth says.
The season will wrap on June 6 with “Pictures,” a multimedia concert inspired by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Mussorgsky’s work — originally written as a piano suite in 1874 and rearranged over the years into countless orchestrations — is a musical exploration of the individual artworks in an exhibition devoted to his late friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann.
STEPHEN PAULUS
The piece has inspired numerous remixes, including Voices From the Gallery by New Jersey native Stephen Paulus. “It basically takes 11 different pieces of art and is narrated in musical commentary as if they were talking directly to the audience,” LaGruth says. “It ranges from ‘The Winged Victory of Samothrace’ to ‘American Gothic’ to Picasso’s ‘Ghost.’ It’s just a lot of fun and a natural pairing with the Mussorgsky piece.”
The concert will also include Camille Saint-Saëns’ playful Danse macabre, the famous symphonic tone poem for violin and large orchestra.
LaGruth came aboard the LSO in 2015. Previous leadership roles included the Garden State Philharmonic and Lyric Opera of San Antonio.
The Symphony was founded in 1956 as a community orchestra. Its core of 45-50 semi-professional musicians rehearse every week in preparation for each concert. Auxiliary musicians are supplemented as needed.
“We really do have quite a fine talent pool in the community players of Livingston,” LaGruth says. “Many of them are excellent, and all of them are quite good.”
One of the biggest challenges of leading a community ensemble is getting their message out beyond the core audience that comes to concerts because they live in town or know somebody who plays in the orchestra.
“We also live in the shadow of a lot of big boys,” LaGruth says. “We have the New Jersey Symphony 15 miles or so from us, and hop across the river and you’ve got your choice of the world’s greatest orchestras on any given evening.
“But as we like to say, ‘We’re close to perfect, but we’re closer to home.’ ”
For more on Livingston Symphony Orchestra, visit lsonj.org.
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