by John Boles
On April 11, 2025, IFMCA member John Boles had the wonderful opportunity to attend the world premiere of a suite of music from Philip Klein’s THE LAST FULL MEASURE, originally released in 2020.
The suite was performed by the Greater Rochester Women’s Philharmonic at Nazareth University in Rochester, NY. The all-volunteer orchestra – made up of professional, semi-professional, and amateur musicians, and conducted by Nancy Strelau, Nazareth’s Director of Orchestras and String Coordinator – assembles on a roughly annual basis to host a free concert raising funds for Willow Domestic Abuse Center, also based in Rochester.
Klein grew up in the Rochester area, where as he puts it, Strelau was a “huge influence on my early musical life” – he studied conducting and composition with her, while also playing in a youth orchestra she directed. The connection led Strelau to reach out to Klein, now a successful composer and orchestrator living in Los Angeles, to see if he could contribute a piece for this year’s concert. Klein selected THE LAST FULL MEASURE because he has a “soft spot” for the score: “It was my first larger-scale score and it features such sweeping thematic ideas.”
The choice was well made, as the score, by turns heroic and tender, lent itself well to the inspiring mood of the event. The 11-minute suite hit on all the score’s major themes and highlights, crescendoing to overwhelming effect multiple times before the finale. The makeshift orchestra gathered to practice just three times in advance of the concert but managed to deliver an enthusiastic and admirable performance, rough edges and all. Particularly poignant were the voices of a small choir of music therapists, assembled specifically for this concert. Vocals play a critical role in Klein’s score, and their presence here gave the performance a vital energy, most notably in the quieter moments (such as the finale of the cue “I Knew What He Was Thinking,” which appeared in the first half of the suite).
Klein was thrilled with how the performance turned out: “I can’t thank Maestro Strelau, the Philharmonic, and my copyist, Dan Brown, enough. It was a special evening and I was thrilled to premiere the piece in the area that I grew up in.”