DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997                 TAG: 9704040003

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial

                                            LENGTH:   65 lines

VIRGINIA SYMPHONY HIGH NOTE WITH ITS CARNEGIE HALL DEBUT, THE ORCHESTRA IS BIDDING FOR NATIONAL RECOGNITION - AND NEW BUSINESS FOR THE REGION.

No need to travel to New York's 2,800-seat Carnegie Hall to hear great, live symphonic music: You can hear and see the Virginia Symphony orchestra perform as many as 140 times a year in Hampton Roads.

But on April 15, the Virginia Symphony, under the baton of acclaimed Music Director JoAnn Falletta, will present a concert at Carnegie Hall. That will be a first for the 76-year-old orchestra. Many Hampton Roads fans of the symphony will be on hand for the debut. And many others who won't be going to New York will hear, on April 12 or 13 at Norfolk's Chrysler Hall, the Carnegie Hall program. The orchestra merits full houses both nights to send it off to the Big Apple.

With its Carnegie Hall concert, the Virginia Symphony will raise its visibility. The Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Bournemouth (England) Symphony Orchestra are also on the Carnegie Hall bill this month.

The 77-member Virginia Symphony has had to struggle to keep its head above water financially. That's been true since the orchestra's beginning, in 1921, as the Norfolk Symphony. It's fair to say that the symphony exists primarily because dedicated musicians were willing to play for years for little or no pay, and their pay is still below that in comparable metropolitan areas.

The orchestra's appearance at Carnegie Hall is the product of an energy surge ignited by Falletta's leadership. Also attesting to the surge:

Three compact-disc recordings - the first, featuring composer and Norfolk State University music Professor Adolphus Hailstork's Piano Concerto; the second, to be released in May, of Handel's ``Messiah,'' with the 100-voice Virginia Symphony Chorus; and the third, the Carnegie Hall concert.

The Music & the Arts' cover story on Falletta and the orchestra and distribution of the first compact disc to the magazine's 70,000 subscribers.

Presentation of Sergei Prokofiev's powerful score for Director Sergei Eisenstein's ``Alexander Nevsky'' along with a screening of the classic silent film.

Board members' commitment of $1 million to the symphony's just-announced $3 million capital campaign.

National Public Radio's forthcoming 200-station broadcast, on ``Performance Today,'' of the orchestra playing the music from its Carnegie Hall program.

Scheduled collaboration with Virginia Stage Company and the Virginia Children's Chorus in a production of Shakespeare's ``Midsummer Night's Dream,'' with incidental music by Felix Mendelssohn.

A strategic plan containing precise objectives for audience development, education and finance.

At Carnegie Hall, the symphony also will be flying the flags of the Hampton Roads Economic Development Alliance; Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake and Newport News; and Virginia. The state is underwriting $100,000 of the orchestra's expenses for the New York appearance.

Also prominent among contributors are Norfolk Southern, NationsBank, WTKR-TV, The New York Times Company Foundation and Ferguson Enterprises. Forward Hampton Roads, the economic-development arm of the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce, is financing a pre-concert reception for businesses that might consider expanding to Hampton Roads.

These are heady days for the Virginia Symphony, where subscriptions to the 1997-98 series are at this point running 50 percent ahead of last year. Three years ago, the symphony's finances were disarrayed and the organization was without a strategic plan. All that has changed. A standing ovation seems appropriate.

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