Chamber Orchestra of Sarasota aims to start a tradition with annual holiday concert

Robert Vodnoy is a total music history nerd.

Discussing the program for Chamber Orchestra of Sarasota’s upcoming “Comfort and Joy: A Holiday Concert” with him doubles as a lesson in the forefathers of chamber music.

“When you think of chamber music, Bach is like the fountainhead,” he says. “When orchestras came into existence, who were the composers? Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, so we want to include music that’s formative.”

Vodnoy, the music director for the orchestra, says choosing the program for the group’s second annual holiday concert took a great deal of consideration. 

Whittling down the list was the biggest challenge because originally he had 95 minutes of music he wanted to include. 

The list he eventually settled on includes 10 pieces, two of which are nods to forefather Bach. The orchestra will play Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C Minor with oboist Nicholas Arbolino and violinist Cindi Qi, and they’ll also play “Nur ein Wink von seinen Händen” from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with guest soprano Johanna Fincher.

Besides Vodnoy’s beloved Bach, the concert will include Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite. The suite isn’t a grouping of Christmas songs, they’re actually renaissance dances for strings, but Vodnoy says they’re festive in their own right — think a Shakespearean movie where the characters go into the grand hall and there’s a little orchestra playing. That’s the music they would play, he says.

Vodnoy also wanted to vary the repertoire and get outside the Baroque period, so he included a piece from the animated film “The Snowman,” Howard Blake’s “Walking in the Air,” which Fincher will also sing.

He also felt the need to feature something more modern that would be a nice surprise for attendees, so Vodnoy placed “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the program. It’s timely both because of the “Bohemian Rhapsody” movie currently in theaters, as well as for an unlikely reason.

In the United Kingdom, there’s a group called The Official Charts Co. that monitors the country’s radio charts. One of the most coveted lists it dishes out every year is the UK Christmas 100, which surprisingly includes a great deal of non-Christmas songs.

Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is the only song on the list to ever receive the title of Christmas No. 1 twice by the same artist.

“There’s something about the lyrics — the talk of real life and fantasy that seems to resonate with the holidays,” Vodnoy says.

He also included his favorite Hanukkah medley, “Festive Sounds of Hanukkah” by Bill Holcombe, to ensure the concert offered something beyond Christian and secular music.

Having a holiday concert at a church, Vodnoy also felt like he should make a nod to the old tradition of Christmas symphonies, which were often played by church orchestras in the Baroque period. That’s why he included Schiassi’s Christmas Symphony.

Vodnoy hopes this concert can help the orchestra work toward his goal of establishing its brand.

“To have people come to expect we’ll have a concert around the holidays,” he says of his goals. “To establish that as something people can look forward to.”

He also hopes to gain enough interest to offer another concert later in the season.

When he started the group at the end of 2017, Vodnoy was living and working in South Dakota and flew to Florida shortly before the holiday performance to rehearse. He and his wife, Kayla, have since moved to Venice full time, so he looks forward to devoting more of his energy to the orchestra.

Chamber music offers its own unique listening experience, Vodnoy says, and he’s confident he can get more people to appreciate it in a town like Sarasota.

“There’s a niche here,” he says. “This is a lot easier than trying to put on a concert where it’s a cultural desert. The fact that there’s an orchestra and a ballet company and an opera company already here doesn’t tell me they don’t need any more, it tells me there’s an audience here.”