The Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra had standing room only for its final Pops concert of the season in Hamilton Place this weekend.

And that is very heartening and very fitting.

The orchestra's Pops concerts have resembled the season's grand finale, Ravel's Bolero, since conductor Michael Reason took charge of them – a steadily-building, ever more robust and growing crescendo of success.

I spend my life sitting in audiences and the happiest, most content and those that have felt most firmly they've had good value for money are those at the HPO's Pops concerts.

It was nice to see so many young people there and hear people remark that this was the first time they'd ever been in Hamilton Place.

Gotta Dance is what the concert was called and it was typical Reason fare.

It began on Broadway with the Overture to Rogers and Hart's On Your Toes before time-machining back to 19th century Vienna for Johann Strauss's Thunder and Lightning Polka. The percussion section did such an enthusiastic job of being thunder and lightning that the orchestra was at times barely audible.

Now, the tango has often been called "a vertical expression of an horizontal idea," if you'll pardon my eyebrows flying up and down like Groucho Marx's and me tapping the ash of my cigar suggestively like WC. Fields.

And I'm here to tell you dancer Sue Gar was just perfect for expressing that idea for all us gents in the audience. I'm sure her partner, John Ross, was an Apollo to the audience's distaff side. They danced Leroy Anderson's Blue Tango so smoothly it was like cream being poured into coffee.

And that was nothing compared to what they did with the liveliest jive I've ever seen in the Tribute To Swing. Ross threw Gar all over the Hamilton Place stage and in about every direction he could to Glen Miller's In The Mood and Benny Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing.

She kept snapping back like a yo-yo and neither of them missed a single step or beat. It was a treat that brought the house down.

Ross and Gar weren't the only dancers on hand. Canada's virtuoso tap dancer, William Orlowski, choreographer extraordinary at the Shaw Festival, performed Morton Gould's Concerto For Tap Dancer and Orchestra. It is a fourmovement work – a bacchanalian toccata, a sentimental mime, a bluesy/classical minuet and a folksy rondo.

The tap dancer behaves exactly like a concerto soloist, inserting his carefully fitted offerings into the orchestral tutti, breaking out into dazzling cadenzas.

As Orlowski said, "Tap dancing speaks the vernacular," and the odd time I felt it was somewhat slangy for Morton's music but the contrast was refreshing rather than jarring.

Orlowski's skills were stunning and he was called back for an encore, a cappella tap that was even more stunning.

The orchestra showed itself off to great effect in the frenetic Sailors' Dance from Gliere's opera The Red Poppy, a somewhat chaotic Fiesta Latina of mambos and sambas and, of course, Ravel's Bolero which featured wonderful soloing from this fine orchestra and built, like the entire series, to a satisfying and triumphant climax.

The orchestra, too, got its encore and ripped through Sabre Dance as if every pair of pants onstage was on fire.

By Hugh Fraser, May 1, 2000
Special to The Hamilton Spectator