Principia Partnership Benefits Musicians—and Community
Pirates, monsters, marionettes, and a Mozart look-alike demonstrated musical virtuosity as well as a sense of humor as the Town & Country Symphony Orchestra (TCSO) delivered its annual Halloween Concert in a packed Ridgway Auditorium on the last weekend in October. Dressed in costumes that were a distinct departure from their formal performance attire, the musicians entertained concertgoers with a rousing program that featured two guest soloists and combined a classical repertoire with a couple of movie and Broadway themes.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of a partnership in which the TCSO uses Principia School’s performing arts facilities for most of its season performances and related rehearsals, enabling Principia to share its campus with members of the community. As the National Endowment for the Arts notes on its website, “Community orchestras in the U.S. provide a great deal of musical, social, and civic value for their musicians and audiences, and for the broader community as well”—a description that certainly holds true in this case. The always-free, Sunday-afternoon performances draw listeners from around St. Louis and neighboring towns and counties.
Established 65 years ago as the Maplewood-Richmond Heights Orchestra, the group became the Brentwood Symphony Orchestra when it began using facilities in the Brentwood School District. When the time came to seek out new spaces in 1998, the City of Town & Country invited the orchestra to relocate—and Principia stepped in with an offer to use Ridgway Auditorium and the former band room for practices. The 2017 renovations to the School’s Performing Arts Center have provided even more space and flexibility to host the orchestra’s intensive series of rehearsals before each performance.
The audience for performances has grown steadily over the past two decades, notes TCSO Music Director David Lowell Peek, who has conducted the group since 1983. “This indicates that the orchestra is meeting a great need within the community,” he says. “The TCSO is feeding the soul of a public that is deeply appreciative of music and artistic expression”—an audience, he notes, that is not always able to attend or afford recitals at other venues.
The TCSO is constituted entirely of volunteer musicians ranging from talented high school students to experienced stalwarts in their 80s who—in addition to “day jobs” as teachers, lawyers, or doctors, in many cases—are dedicated to supporting the community by sharing their love of music. Principia’s Band Directors Martha Stitzel and Mike Griswold, as well as administrators, happily support that mission. And, occasionally, Principia Upper School students have performed with the TCSO, although intense academic, sports, and School performing schedules make that difficult. Recently, however, other students have been getting in on the act. Since 2017, Middle School Girls' Dorm housemom Karin Heath and her students have been serving as ushers for TCSO performances.
This year, in addition to hosting the TCSO series, the School is also hosting several District performances—for middle and high school Honors Concert Bands, Honors Jazz Bands, and Honors Choirs. With these concerts scheduled for early and mid-November, all corners of our Performing Arts Center will be ringing out with music and song for the next several weeks in a run-up to the students’ end-of-semester performances in Ridgway.