After a three-month absence, the Sedona Symphony returned to the Sedona Performing Arts Center on Sunday, Feb. 2, with its most classical program of the season, featuring a solo performance by violinist Tai Murray.

First on the program was the overture from the Chevalier de Saint-Georges’ opera “L’Amant Anonyme,” really a string piece by a string virtuoso in which the winds appeared almost as an afterthought. The overture is in three movements, similar to and as long as the Chevalier’s extant symphonies, reflecting a period when “overture” and “symphony” were interchangeable terms. The first movement was essentially promenade music for the ci-devant aristos filing into the opera house, while the second movement, with its melancholic strains, anticipated the future of French music in the 19th century. The third returned to eager gaiety, albeit with some slight retardations pour l’avantage de l’orchestre, with breakout sessions for the violins and much delicate backtalk between the two sections. The Symphony produced very solid playing throughout, the strings doing well with the little details in the first exposition and providing the attentive ensemble playing needed to do justice to the refined elegance of Saint-Georges’ style.

The Symphony followed up Saint-Georges with a better-known work by his onetime neighbor in Paris, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Violin Concerto No. 5, sometimes called the “Turkish.” With the orchestra setting an appropriately brisk tempo from the start, Murray began the first movement with an intimate, insinuating tone before proceeding to take the next passages at a dazzling pace, the basses and cellos providing consistent support for her furious high notes. Her style of play can only be described as dashing, almost casually so. This was no Yehudi Menuhin-Herbert von Karajan drawing-room interpretation, but a spirited, youthful, springlike plunge into the work’s melodic richness.

The second movement, of course, was not so rich — they never are. Pensive rather than lugubrious at first, with Murray giving the impression that she was wandering in an avenue of lindens, paralleling the ensemble and only happening to coincide with it, the mood naturally shifted to dark reflection. The violin’s voice stood out as a bitter orange against the mild heather honey of the ensemble, which Artistic Director Janna Hymes handled so as to produce an easy, well-judged legato that helped the violin recover its equilibrium, returning to the resurgence of the movement’s opening bars. Murray then switched approaches and took the orchestra along with her for the final movement, eschewing their earlier separation, as she practically danced the renewed cheerfulness of the main theme before it yielded to the Romany-flavored second theme from which the work draws its nickname, her infectious verve inspiring some really fine unified playing.

The program concluded with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, in D Major, always one of the two most promising keys for an orchestral work. Hymes set a fairly decent tempo in the opening adagio, but her tempo choice for the allegro was noticeably slow. The simple fact is that almost no conductor ever plays Beethoven’s symphonies at the exact tempo the composer, who was an early and enthusiastic adopter of the metronome, specified; they are uniformly performed more slowly than written. In this case, Hymes appeared to take a tempo roughly 10 beats per minute slower than Beethoven’s markings for the first and second movements. The result was a majestic, perhaps even saurian, rendition with the emphasis on power rather than fire and steadiness rather than inflection. A slight degree of discombobulation made itself manifest at first before the Symphony settled themselves to the task and blended their sound into an entrancing single voice, revealing the extent to which Beethoven, unmatched by any other composer, was able to use an entire orchestra as his instrument. They successfully captured the driving thrust within the work that gives the impression of being astride the back of a hunter during a day at the horse show. Hymes led with considerable enthusiasm and animation; Beethoven certainly brings out the best in her orchestral handling.

In the second movement, the emphasis on mini-roles for the woodwinds became more noticeable, with the exchanges among them handled smoothly, especially in the stormy moments. If this symphony very much reflects a day at the horse show, the larghetto can be seen as a series of alternate cuts between two sets of scenes, the relaxation of the spectators with sandwiches and juleps on the lawn and the nervous anticipation of a competitor saddling up in the paddock.

For the final movements, both of which are shorter in length, Hymes switched to tempos much closer to those Beethoven desired, making the third bright but not bouncy and still keeping it more stately than spirited. She produced a little extra prominence from the horns, evoking a hunt ball feeling, and added traces of rubato in the fourth, which hurtled on toward the final fences with both energy and control. The strings developed a lovely rhythmic throbbing right before encountering those two blocks of frenzied eighth notes in the final bars, which represent some of Beethoven’s most tricky writing — and they nailed those, too. The Symphony’s playing was full of character and captured the great strength of the work as a whole, delivering a performance that caught up the listeners and allowed them to achieve union with Beethoven’s triumphant expression of humanity’s potential. The result also represented quite an impressive improvement from Hymes’ first Beethoven with this same orchestra one year and 10 months ago.

Beatlemania!

Symphony board of trustees president Margaret Davis announced that the Symphony’s pops concert, the “Classical Mystery Tour,” a tribute to the Beatles, will take place on Saturday, April 26, in collaboration with the Sedona International Film Festival, which will be screening Beatles films at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre before the concert.

Davis also announced that the Symphony will launch its 2025-26 season on Sunday, Oct. 19, which will be followed two days later by the Symphony’s first touring performance at the Yavapai College Performing Arts Center, in partnership with the Yavapai Symphony Association.