Anchorage Daily News

We've heard plenty of pieces of music celebrating great military victories (or losses), famous leaders and political events. But aside from college jokes about Mozart's "Plague" Symphony, I never imagined someone would write an overture to commemorate a medical triumph.

Until Saturday night, when Hong Kong composer Daniel Law's "Menuha" Overture, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the SARS epidemic and the medical heroes who finally conquered the disease, was performed by the Anchorage Civic Orchestra in Sydney Laurence Theatre.

The piece opens with a sickly chromatic descending motif. A snare drum triggers a sense of greater urgency as the crisis deepens. Trumpets (doctors?) signal a long exchange of struggle, tension, chaos and trouble before -- with the sweep of the harp -- a simple, folk-like hymn tune (apparently collected by Ralph Vaughan Williams of "For All the Saints" fame) takes over and a mood of triumph and tranquility ("Menuha" is Hebrew for "rest") concludes the piece.

Intense and challenging, it set the tone for one of the most ambitious and interesting programs presented here in the past few years. The ACO obviously worked hard to get Law's unexpectedly rewarding piece in shape for the performance.

But they probably worked even harder on the next item, the world premiere of an orchestrated version of Sonata for Horn by Anchorage's beloved band man and teacher, Curtiss Blake, killed with his wife and daughter in the crash of a Cessna 170 in 2004. Dan Heynen, who orchestrated the work from Blake's student years for this occasion, was also the soloist -- and he did a marvelous job fulfilling both responsibilities.

Blake's piece opens with a long solo cadenza leading into a moody first movement that ends quietly. There's an energetic scherzo (and a slow movement, not included because Heynen and Blake's heirs worried that it would be as difficult to play as it was to listen to) and a rollicking finale.

The orchestra handled the hurdles well enough so that by the end of the work I felt confident in proclaiming it one of the five best horn concertos to have been composed in the last 200 years. Admittedly, the list of all horn concertos written in the last 200 years is not much longer than that, but I'm standing by it.

The end of the concert, Dvorak's New World Symphony, had some worried. The piece is among the crown jewels of orchestral literature and an inferior performance would be the cause for much dismay. The ACO, after all, is an amateur orchestra, even if several of its members are professional-calibre players. Dvorak fans could be excused for dreading what they were about to hear.

In fact, at a key point in the Largo, the trumpets came in several bars early and played their whole line while the rest of the players struggled to figure out what was going and the movement teetered on unraveling. Happily, the band managed to keep its collective head and, with a timely cue from conductor Wai Tai Li, everything lurched back on track.

Otherwise, the all important horns (Heynen being back in his seat again) carried their part at full strength, the winds largely acquitted themselves with distinction and the often problematic strings did themselves credit, pushing the climaxes at the end of the first and last movements in a thoroughly enjoyable manner.

On a sunny Alaska spring afternoon, it can be hard to drag oneself to any kind of indoor event. But this is one concert I'll always be glad I got to.

Find Mike Dunham online at adn.com/contact/mdunham or call 257-4332.

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