By Charlotte Dutton

On Friday, conductor Bridget-Michaele Reischl took the Oberlin Orchestra, parents, students and townspeople to a land of fairy tales and Greek myth.

Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22 is a auditory trip to a mythical place and George Auric’s Phèdre Suite, Maurice Ravel’s Site No. 2 from Daphnis et Chloé and Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus are all pieces based on Greek myths.

The concert opened with Beethoven’s Overture to The Creatures of Prometheus. Conducted by Master of Music degree candidate Yun Le Feng ’10, this lively and pompous Overture led us into Friday’s concert with verve and gust. Though short, Feng’s presence in front of the orchestra was engaging and precise. Brava!

Maestro Reischl then entered with concerto competition winner Si-Yuan Li ’10 to perform Saint-Saëns’s second piano concerto. This fun and oftentimes-melodramatic concerto is lush with musical imagery and the atmospheric setting flits from Paris’s salon-culture to the forests and fairies reminiscent of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Saint-Saëns’s compositions frequently sound fantasy-like in their runs in the upper registers and impish arpeggios and chords and this piece is no exception.

Li played this concerto with abandon, from the opening’s seemingly improvised, almost Bachian Toccata, through many a trilled, octave, scaled and arpeggiated passage. Her fingers flew across the keys with the speed of the fairies she portrayed flying across the flower petals. The talent within the white walls of the conservatory always inspires me, and Li’s success tonight reaffirmed my extreme pride of attending this world-class conservatory of music.

After intermission, the orchestra played Auric’s Phédre (Suite symphonique tirée du ballet), a piece based on the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus. This suite of seven movements tells the tale of love, jealousy, rage and revenge in a rather odd and fragmented way. The mood and movement changed rather quickly and schizophrenically. Although the suite was well played, its form and scheme was rather baffling.

The concert closed with a beautiful rendition of the second orchestral suite from Ravel’s ballet, Daphnis et Chloé. In the ballet, the character Lamon the shepherd tells Daphnis and Chloe the story of Pan and Syrinx, and the resulting flute solo is sublime. Flutist Patrick Williams ’11 shone and sparkled in his role as the god Pan.

In my humble opinion, anyone would be a fool not to fall immediately in love with this sexy, sensual and very impressionistic work. With the opening sounds of ripping water as the sun rises, the swells of the strings and the various solos within the woodwinds that personify the characters in the ballet, this suite shows the audience what Ravel could do with orchestration.

The Oberlin Orchestra’s foray through this pantheon of Greek-inspired pieces provided a beautiful example of the timelessness of these stories and their adaptability to different styles of music—the classical, romantic, impressionistic and modern. The Oberlin Orchestra championed these pieces of Olympian Heights with vigor and aplomb.