Brian L. Diehl

The fourth movement contained the part of the piece that Maestro Rhodes said in a recent interview that he most looked forward to - the extended solo cadenza. Diehl himself described his intention in creating the cadenza as follows: "...it will become things that are recognizable - I'm thinking of it kind of like the soundtrack of earth that was aboard the Viking Mars lander - music that you'd want to share with an alien society."

It was all of that. Shaped by Diehl's wit and fantasy, full of sounds molded by an array of straight mutes, bucket mutes, plunger mutes, and enhanced by his reflective pas de deux with a derby mute mounted on a nearby microphone stand, the cadenza proved by turns remarkable, inscrutable, and humorous. Diehl produced actual chord progressions from the trombone, traded wahs with his section-mates, riffed on the Kodaly theme from Close Encounters, and eventually emerged into the finale, a galaxy of orchestral color - a harmonic starscape of stacked thirds.

An immediate standing ovation greeted Diehl's stellar performance, and tuba player Stephen Perry met him at the podium with a bottle of champagne, while his section-mates stood and hailed him with a trombone fanfare.