Mary Chapin Carpenter with the National Symphony Orchestra, Wolf Trap Filene Center, 8/1/2014

On the first Tuesday of this year, Mary Chapin Carpenter released her latest CD, Songs From The Movie, featuring orchestral versions of 10 songs chosen from her previous albums. Friday evening’s Wolf Trap performance, with Vince Mendoza (who was the arranger and conductor for the album) conducting the National Symphony Orchestra, was the on-tour version of the album. The orchestra was augmented by Matt Rollings on keyboards, drummer Peter Erskine, and bass player Edwin Livingston, who are traveling with Carpenter for this tour.

The evening’s performance began with Elmer Bernstein’s suite from To Kill a Mockingbird, after with Carpenter and her band mates came on stage to a warm welcome from the crowd. (Nice size, but definitely not a sellout.) The remainder of the set closely paralleled the album, albeit with a few minor changes in order. “Where Time Stands Still” was the only song from the CD that was omitted, replaced near the end of the show with “Stones in the Road” and “10,000 Miles”.

The arrangements and performances were very professional, and Carpenter clearly enjoyed the opportunity to present some of her slower songs in this setting. Personally, I would have enjoyed them more in non-orchestral versions that were closer to the original recordings. I didn’t think that old favorites such as “I Am A Town”, “Come On Come On,” and “Stones in the Road” benefited from the added instrumentation. And, although it was clearly by design, the predominance of Carpenter’s more contemplative material led to a certain lack of energy and sameness in tempo, which was finally remedied by the encore version of “The Hard Way”, which elicited the most enthusiastic audience response of the evening. Prior to that, my clear favorite was “10,000 Miles”, since it had originally featured an orchestral arrangement on the Party Doll compilation and in the movie Fly Away Home.