Contrasting Climates Featured in Elgin Symphony Concert

Audiences were transported across a variety of musical landscapes and languages this weekend as the Elgin Symphony Orchestra presented a series of picturesque works, enlivened by guest artist performances. With attendance near full capacity Saturday, the Hemmens Auditorium buzzed with anticipation of another superb concert led by Musical Director Robert Hanson.

The first stop was at Fingal's Cave, a rock formation in the islands west of Scotland, where Felix Mendelssohn was thought to have taken his inspiration for The Hebrides Overture around 1830, when he was in his twenties. The sensation of deep and shallow waters, and visions of Fingal (the Scots' mythical giant) filled the hall, as echoes of the Classical masters and shades of the new German Romantics clashed throughout Mendelssohn's rarely peaceful work. The orchestra played like a force of nature, through tense countermelodies, stormy chords and crashing sixteen-note unisons, drawing on a collective musical consciousness that spans the continents and the centuries.

French composer Edouard Lalo's Symphonie espagnole (1875) for Violin and Orchestra featured soloist Chee-Yun in a magnificent performance. The concerto-like work in five movements has a definite Mediterranean flavor, seasoned with traces of Gypsy dance, and spicy rhythms imported from the New World. From one moment to the next, you cannot take your eyes off the radiant Chee-Yun as she teases airy and intricate phrases from the Stradivarius, then tumbles three octaves into a swarthy, even scandalous twirl through the low register. The orchestra all but disappears when she plays, until her notes are briefly doubled by another voice in a sultry musical gancho. Her effortless blending of wet and dry techniques were like a feast of Spanish tapas that you wished would never end.

For an encore, Chee-Yun's performance of a Fritz Kreisler cadenza offered more stunning proof that world-class talent is as much a part of Elgin culture as the local pub where she and other musicians gathered after the concert. And the community clearly loves the ESO: even though most patrons had already seen the video preview of next year's concert season, they gladly applauded it once again.

Headlining the program was Aaron Copland's beloved Appalachian Spring, a suite derived from music he wrote for a ballet depicting the American pioneers of western Pennsylvania. The music starts off open and transparent, as the winds bravely enter, one or two at a time, just the way early Americans set out across the continent with no cover from the elements. As different tones and tempos come together with a form, scale and repetition not unlike the art-glass designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, the music finds a voice we now recognize as characteristically American. On a compositional spectrum that includes Gershwin and Bernstein, Copland's musical language touches us prairie folk the deepest, and the ESO, with perfect diction, speaks this language like true natives.

An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise by contemporary English composer Peter Maxwell Davies served as the dramatic finale. While the reverse dotted figures and solo reeds are recognizably Scottish, the unfamiliar (uncomfortable to some) musical setting throughout this piece clearly charts a territory few of us know. The piece required unusual discipline from the ESO throughout its chaotic middle, but the convincing final entrance of Highland bagpiper Carl Donley reminds us of everything we love about the Scotch: though like the whisky, some will say it's an acquired taste.

Elgin Symphony's Impassioned "Don Juan and Dvorak"

Shouts of approval from the hall capped the finale of the ESO's "Don Juan and Dvorak" program of classics Friday afternoon at the Hemmens. The audience took every opportunity to applaud Elgin's acclaimed orchestra, now in its 61st season. In fact, the enthusiastic response to Music Director Robert Hanson's first appearance on stage was exceeded only by the standing ovation at the concert's end.  The ESO displayed superb artistry in the two hour program, performing a diverse and delightful set of classics that explored the musical expressions of drama, dance, poetry, and song.

None other than Mozart gives us the first of two musical takes on the legend of Don Juan, the mythical Spanish playboy whose quest for knowledge of the opposite sex eventually leads to his own destruction. In the overture to the comic opera known as Don Giovanni, Mozart deftly sets the stage for tragedy as well as comedy in a characteristically entertaining style that invites you into the drama like only the cleverest book jacket blurb or movie preview. A consummate showman at heart, the composer finished the overture the very day before its 1787 premiere in Prague.  Two hundred twenty-four years later, the ESO played it as if it was being heard for the first time: with freshness, intensity and an obvious affection for the audience and the art.

We may never know the number of Don Juan's children, but his literary and artistic progeny span at least twenty generations. His legend was the subject and namesake of Richard Strauss's breakout symphonic poem, written a century after Mozart's opera, when Strauss was only 24. At its opening flourish, you realize that this is like no poetry you've heard before. Images of a dashing Don Juan spring to life from the orchestra: you can hear silver conchos jangling on his belt, see his sword slicing the air, feel his breath as if he's striding towards you. This music tests every limit of the orchestra to produce all the effects of a motion picture without pictures or dialogue.  At Maestro Hanson's direction, the combined forces of more than sixty-five musicians are able to create a kind of superhuman musical voice, just the sort of thing that would preoccupy Strauss's imagination for the rest of his life. From tender, lyrical, romantic interludes to fierce moments of conflict, the ESO conveyed a full and complex range of pathos with a brilliant musical technique, ending the Don's story with a three-note ellipsis that would seem to say, "we'll be hearing much more from this young composer."

Yet it is often the simplest phrases and quietest notes that separate a good musician from a great one. The abundance of such in the Ancient Airs and Dances -- Suite No. 1 leave no doubt which sort of musician plays in the ESO. The endearingly coy rhythms of Ottorio Respighi's modern setting of Renaissance formal dances proved that there is beauty in restraint. Elegant solos and duets by double reeds and strings against a transparent but perfectly syncrhonized orchestral accompaniment were as fluid and intimate as those of a seasoned quartet. Unlike a similar suite by his English contemporary Peter Warlock, Respighi's use of lute-like harp chords — and harpsichord — lent a loving, period authenticity to the work, which still moves us, musician and audience alike, to tap our feet and nod our heads with the music as we recall the ancient urge to dance.

Following the intermission, the concert concluded with Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8, considered an unusually cheerful work from a period when other composers of his own generation were writing music with much darker tones. The sights and sounds of his native Bohemia would seem to have inspired many of his musical motifs, whose natural, song-like phrasings are easy to grasp and remember. Colorful flute solos and a clarinet duet decorated the four movements, which ventured smoothly through numerous changes of tempo and meter, each section in turn playing perfectly in unison, then in harmony.

As his career progressed, Dvorak gravitated westward, eventually spending three years in America where he would leave us an important musical gift: not just his famous Ninth Symphony "From the New World," nor his "American Suite," but a lasting vision for American music that included the unique influences of Native American and African American sounds. If you listen closely to the fourth movement of Symphony No. 8, you might hear a "blue" note or two — the musical twinkle in Dvorak's eye that would someday be heard again in American jazz, gospel, and blues music.

The ESO presents two more performances of "Don Juan and Dvorak," Saturday, March 5th at 8:00 pm and Sunday, March 6th at 3:30 pm. Tickets are still available online at www.elginsymphony.org or call the Box Office at (847) 888-4000.