FARGO — When Sonja Bosca-Harasim steps on stage Saturday night as the soloist for the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony Orchestra concert, she’ll play Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” for the first time publicly. The first time, but definitely not the last. She’s already looking forward to playing again.
And again. And again. “It’s been a really great journey,” she said of learning the work earlier this week.
“This piece, with each performance, I want to play it more and more. It transports you to a different world that (Williams) was portraying in this beautiful piece.” The selection will be featured at this weekend’s FMSO concert on the theme of “Bliss.
” The concerts — Saturday night and Sunday afternoon — also feature Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Overture to “The Marriage of Figaro,” “Vocalise” by Sergei Rachmaninoff and ends with Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5. But it’s “The Lark Ascending” that has captured the imagination of Bosca-Harasim, the FMSO’s principal violinist and concertmaster.
“There are so many different layers to it. It’s a beautiful piece no matter what,” she said. Vaughan Williams wrote the piece, inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same name, in 1914.
On its surface, it’s a reflection of the bird singing and in flight with the violin fluttering and soaring high above the rest of the orchestra. “Sometimes I imagine I’m a bird and think how the lark sounds,” Bosca-Harasim said. “.