Music: GBSO performance another step in the group's climb to the top By Erik Eriksson News-Chronicle Despite more fusillades of irritating audience applause between movements, music director Bridget-Michaele Reischl and the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra held to the adventuresome high road they have been traveling with increasing excitement. Another imaginatively assembled program was the first of the several attractions. Increased refinement and tonal refulgence were others. Most important of all was Reischl's immersion in her choices and her beautifully judged realizations of them. Understanding that orchestras cannot simply be curators of works from distant ages, Reischl once more chose an attractive work of recent vintage and undoubted importance with which she could begin the concert. Jennifer Higdon's "blue cathedral" is free-flight movement through a floating crystal cathedral entered from the back. As the observer/listener moves forward, stars are seen through the transparent walls and ceiling. Composed for the 75th anniversary of the Curtis Institute of Music (where Higdon is a faculty member), the work materializes from the ether delicately, luminously. Its slowly arrived-at climax holds a kaleidoscopic impact before the music subsides into the chiming of piano chords - 33 times, once for each year of her brother's age at the time of his death. Playing so softly without loosing definition is a test of any orchestra, one met with glistening sound by the GBSO, guided by the assured hand of their music director. Higdon was on hand to share the applause. Next, another neo-Romantic work, albeit of a different vintage and temperament, brought Greek violinist Georgios Demertzis to the stage. Samuel Barber's 1939 Violin Concerto, a work worthy of placement with those of Bartók, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky, begins with breathtaking immediacy and maintains a hold on the listener's attention through its final measure. Close collaboration marked this full and lustrous realization. Barber's concerto has had a number of fine recordings, the best of which are those by Isaac Stern, Gil Shaham and Hilary Hahn. Without quite the superhuman technique of Hahn, Demertzis shaped a supple, emotionally charged reading, modest in volume, but glowing in warmth and handsome tone. Although the work has been in his repertory only a brief time, the soloist embraced and explicated all its facets - from the beginning, in the expansive lyricism of the second movement and in the scurrying final pages. Reischl impressed both for the shapeliness of the phrasing she urged from the orchestra and the sheen she and her players achieved. In all aspects, this was an inspired and uncompromising performance of one of the past century's finest concertos. After intermission, Reischl and her players addressed themselves to the Second Symphony of Jean Sibelius. The episodic nature of each of the work's four movements and the cold grandeur of its character have defeated many otherwise capable conductors, but Reischl had taken its full measure and moved head-on through its pages. Simple execution of notes is insufficient here: tone painting is required to make manifest the composer's evocation of the North. Aside from her understanding of how each portion of the work must stand in relationship to others, Reischl has a keen ear for orchestral color and, here, it was most purposefully deployed. The most critical example came in the final movement where she kept the tempo from flagging and subdued the lumbering motif that can bog the very pages that should ring triumphant. Triumphant they were here, shining forth in that final D major conflagration. Except for some out-of-tune wind passages in the final movement, the orchestra played very well. The brass were heroic, increasingly so as the work unfolded, and the strings mastered the frothing figures and running notes that lend the work its singular texture. In both overall design and fine detail, a formidable performance. About the applause issue. Those who interrupt works with multiple movements do not, I am sure, intend to be boorish, but that is the effect. Concentration needs to be maintained; it cannot be with the intrusion of clapping. Read - and heed - the program insert. Finally, a lingering virus kept us from the Green Bay Civic Symphony's production of "Hansel and Gretel" (told from the Witch's perspective). We hear that area kids lapped up the experience at all three daytime and evening performances, a real boon for the community.