After nearly four decades at Western Michigan University, conductor and cellist Bruce Uchimura is stepping down as music director of the WMU University Symphony Orchestra. His last concert in that role is Sunday, November 8 at 3 p.m. in the Dalton Center Recital Hall.
"In the islands they say this is my Aloha concert," Uchimura tells Cara Lieurance. He joined the faculty of WMU's Irving S. Gilmore School of Music in 1987, and he retires at the end of December.
The concert opens with Johann Sebastian Bach's Concerto for Oboe and Violin, BWV 1060. The soloists are WMU faculty members Jeremiah Quarles, oboe, and Sophie Tang, violin. Quarles explains that the work comes from Bach's double harpsichord concerto, though some musicologists think it was first written for oboe and violin. Uchimura says the soloists set the style for the students: "In a Bach concerto, these two kind of call the shots without even saying anything."
Both soloists say Uchimura helped them settle in at WMU. Tang points out that he sat on the committee that hired her in 2022. Quarles arrived in 2023 with no oboe students, so he played in the orchestra that first year. "I looked forward to that every week, every Thursday," he says.
The program also includes Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, which Uchimura calls charming and full of woodwind solos. It closes with Gioachino Rossini's Overture to La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie).
WMU alum Zach Nicely returns to conduct his Dreadnought Suite. The 18-minute piece arranges tracks from Jonathan Geer's score for Owlboy, a 2016 video game by D-Pad Studio. WMU commissioned the suite together with the Eastern Michigan University Symphony Orchestra. Nicely studied horn and conducting at WMU, then moved to New York and founded the Press Start Orchestra. "I wanted to build an orchestra that plays music from video games with the standard classical repertoire," he says.
Uchimura adds that conductor Andrew Koehler noticed the program's accidental bird theme: magpie, goose and owl. Only the Bach has no bird.
Tickets are available on the School of Music website and at the door.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.