ECSO’s space program has a successful lift-off at the Garde
New London – The handful of Imperial Storm Troopers clad in white armor lurking ominously in the lobby of the Garde Arts Center Saturday night was a clear sign this was not your usual Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra concert.
What was the meaning of these new ushers?
This is what we learned:
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[naviga:li] There’s been an awful lot of orchestral music about outer space.[/naviga:li]
[naviga:li] If your program includes music from “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” you draw a lot of new concert-goers, with a heavy emphasis on Gen X.[/naviga:li]
[naviga:li] In outer space, they sure like their marches.[/naviga:li]
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The fifth concert of the ECSO’s 70th season was named “The Final Frontier,” and its musical galaxy stretched from television to the European avant garde. And throughout, spirits were high, as an informal goofiness was in the air all night, and the audience had a ball. The Storm Troopers were there, no doubt, to keep Brahms at bay.
The tone of the presentation was set early, when Bruce D. Cummings, president and CEO of concert sponsor L+M Healthcare, used his stage time to pull out a light saber that he proposed as the appropriate conductor’s baton. Next, the PA system blasted a recording of a NASA countdown to liftoff as a walk-on track for Music Director Toshi Shimada.
The stage was all but overflowing with more than 85 musicians, including a minimum of four each in the winds and brass and six horns. The horns, trumpets and trombones stretched across the rear of the stage like a line of artillery. There were two harps, two timpani and even two tubas! (Well, one was euphonium …) At one point, a very chatty Shimada gestured to the huge array and said, “All orchestra managers worry about this. It’s very expensive.” Perhaps the ECSO space program was only slightly less costly than the NASA space program.
The concert opened with an excerpt from Jerry Goldsmith’s score to “Star Trek V,” the “Main Theme and March of the Klingons.” After an introductory quote from the theme music to the Sixties TV series, the ECSO quickly blasted off into a brash, brassy march, the first of many on the evening. The first half concluded with a similarly rousing fanfare launching John Williams’ score for the final throne room scene (when our heroes are honored for blowing up that nasty death star) and the end credits music from “Star Wars: A New Hope.” Again, a rousing march filled the hall, with a long segment of stately, almost Elgarian lushness.
In between the sections from iconic Gen X sci-fi fantasies, Shimada sandwiched an epochal, immensely influential nine-minute piece from 1961. Absolving the program from being Pure Pops was Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s “Atmosphère.” Atmospheric indeed, relying on sonic textures, Ligeti’s piece was central to creating the sound world we live in today. Ligeti’s compositions have been used repeatedly in film scores ( “Atmosphère” made it through the air lock Saturday because it was used in full in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”), and it's impossible to imagine works such as John Luther Adams’ 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner, "Become Ocean," without Ligeti’s innovations.
The performance was gripping, in this work with no melodies. Shimada urged the audience, “Just take it as an experience in sound,” and the Garde audience signed on as active listeners. The swelling and fading wash on sound from the stage – ghostly violin harmonics, percussionist Connie Coughlan brushing piano strings by hand, four piccolos screeching like feedback, windy rushes from the horns – held the audience, rapt in searching for sonic centers. It was a marvelous moment of shared creation.
The concert’s big piece was Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.” Much like “Carmina Burana” composer Carl Orff, Holst was a one-hit wonder, “The Planets” holding a firm grip on the pops crowd with its noisy extravagance. In eight discrete sections, the suit characterizes each of the planets musically based on legend and astrology. It was written before Pluto was discovered, and the omission of Pluto is no longer an issue, since the International Astronomical Union kicked Pluto out of the Planet Club in 2006.
Its opening, “Mars, the Bringer of War,” was appropriately ominous and terrifying, with its hair-raising fortissimos and teeth-grinding dissonances. No one said war was pretty, but it set the tone for the often raucous and just plain loud sections to follow. Shimada was fully invested in the other well-known section, “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity.” When most tuneful section of the entire work, Holst’s rendering of the oh-so-British hymn “I Vow to Thee My Country,” was beautifully introduced in a lovely horn chorale, the conductor threw back his head and looked to the heavens with a beatific smile.
Among the most musically effective sections was “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age,” with the tic-toc of passing time in the harps, and later timpani, and the basses groaning like old bones. And the winner of the Best March blue ribbon (and the program featured many) went to the “Uranus, the Magician,” with its goofy and grotesque energy.
The trumpet section, anchored by principal Julia Caruk, the trombones, led by principal Terrence B. Fay, and the horns, with some fine obbligatos by John Michael Adair, drove the excitement throughout. But other voices stood out, including harpists Colleen Thorburn and Sorana Scarlat, usually doubling complex figures, euphonium player Brian Diehl, with his rich, sonorous obbligatos, and keyboardist Laura Hibbard spreading Tinkerbelle fairy dust with the celeste.
The closing section, “Neptune, the Mystic,” spun an eerie calm, with celeste and harps hovering over string tremolos, while the ECSO Women’s Chorus drifted their well-balanced voices from off-stage to add to the mystery. The concert ended on their soaring wordless singing.
In space no one can hear your words.
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