VSO summer pops opens with spirit, panache
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Anthony Princiotti conducts the Vermont Symphony Orchestra in Middlebury Thursday, its inaugural stop on its Summer Festival Tour. PHOTO BY ED BARNA |
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By ED BARNA Correspondent - Published: June 28, 2009
MIDDLEBURY – In addition to being fine music and a lot of fun, the Vermont Symphony Orchestra's summer tour program offers those who have engaged with the classical repertoire opportunities to see how themes can weave together a diverse assortment of both popular and serious pieces.
This 17th "Pops" program, to be replayed in six more locations after its Middlebury debut Thursday evening and a Saturday performance in Randolph, shows why the VSO is $2.7 million along the way to its $3.5 million endowment goal (next year is its 75th anniversary). The performance under the baton of principal guest conductor Anthony Princiotti was one that all Vermonters could be proud of.
"The Lake Effect" is Princiotti's title for the program, a nod to the quadricentennial this year of French explorer Samuel de Champlain's pioneering voyage to the lake that now bears his name, and which has produced a blizzard of related events.
Nautical and French elements predominate, starting at the second piece with selections from George Frideric Handel's 1717 "Water Music" (which relies in part on the French suite form), then Ion Ivanovici's "Waves of the Danube Waltz," then to conclude the first half an American cross-Atlantic exploration, George Gershwin's "American in Paris."
Leading toward the VSO's customary summer finale of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1880 work "1812 Overture" and fireworks along with Sousa marches (this year "Hands Across the Water" as well as "The Stars and Stripes Forever"), there are more French, naval and exploratory pieces. Also, there's an intriguing undertone of resistance and rebellion, though it helps to know that the first piece, Russian Reinhold Gliere's "Russian Sailor's Dance," is part of "The Red Poppy," a very Soviet 1927 ballet about heroic opposition in a Chinese port.
The first piece of the night was Hector Berlioz's "Roman Carnival Overture," a stand-alone orchestral piece he put together from part of his earlier opera about the life of Benvenuto Cellini. Chalk up another for Princiotti's programming: It's a rouser, just the thing to turn an outdoor crowd away from picnicking and child management to the music.
Handel's "Water Music," he explained, was played for a royal party on barges, and was so popular with King George I that the musicians had to play it three times. Mercifully, the VSO would only have to do the Allegro, Bourrée, "Hornpipe" (a sailor's dance) and the Allegro deciso.
Baroque music is a good style in which to hear the VSO's crisp staccatos, unfailingly accurate changes in dynamics, and ability to put out power when that is the essence. They are so unfailingly professional, in the best sense of that word.
Ivanovici's "Waves of the Danube," Princiotti told the crowd, was a classical music world example of the one-hit wonder. The Romanian, who went from soldier to military bandmaster to Inspector of Military Music due to his evident talent, composed about 350 dances and was in 60 music catalogs around the world — but today, Austrian Johann Strauss has overshadowed him.
Nevertheless, "Donauwellen," to give its German name, went as viral as the 19th century could make it after its performance at the 1889 Paris Exposition. Many in the audience probably recognized sections as "The Anniversary Song," created in the 1920s when Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin added words and produced an arrangement that was featured in "The Jolson Story."
The original "Waves" is more complex, mixing confident sweep and nostalgic melancholy in a way that would make it the perfect theme for a Romanian version of "The Godfather."
Gershwin wrote "An American in Paris" after five visits to that international crossroads of cultures in the 1920s. As Princiotti explained, and as his conducting emphasized, Parisian bustle and American blues play off against each other then blend — there are some fiercely delicious advanced harmonies in this piece — so that the American visitor "once again is an alert spectator of Parisian life," as Gershwin put it in the program notes for the piece's premiere.
There was much fine solo or section virtuosity, but special note should be made of the way the horns (orchestral) handled the horns (vehicular) that symbolize Paris's urban urgency. Concertgoers will hear them for days afterward, especially if they bring their kids.
After intermission, the piece that in "The Red Poppy" was "The Captain's Entrance and Sailors Dance" again brought attention and energy up. Don't overlook the theme that accompanies the captain, though: not only is it powerful in itself (it prefigures Russia's bedrock strength and stubborn resistance in The Great Patriotic War), it prepares for the back-and-forth between Russian endurance and French aggression in the concluding "1812 Overture."
There was stubborn French endurance, too, before the Paris Uprising of 1932. The following piece, a medley from the 1980 musical by the French composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and librettist Alain Boublil, derives from Victor Hugo's 1862 historical novel of France after Napoleon treated its poor, "Les Miserables."
Fittingly, that is followed by a "Symphonic Scenario" from the musical "South Pacific," in which an American officer in World War II has an affair with a girl who is Tonkinese (from French Indochina). As Princiotti said, Richard Rodgers had the rare gift of an ability to write one memorable melody after another.
And the VSO has what it takes to make those melodies come alive. How many times have we heard such medleys? Yet, hearing this orchestra, a listener would think that it was premiere night.
The "1812 Overture," celebrating the defense of Moscow against Napoleon's Grande Armee in the Battle of Borodino, came off in grand style. As the celebratory cannon shots began, there was a lightning bolt in the mountains to the east, and Northstar Fireworks put up an enormous red shell-burst, and Sousa got accented with a rocket whose glare was red, white and blue.