Macabre Magnificence from the Canton Symphony Orchestra
By Tom Wachunas
Conjuring the
spirit of Halloween for just one more night, the November 1 program by the
Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO), under the enchanted baton (or magic wand?) of
Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann, was frightfully delicious. Not that I favor
socializing in the netherworld, but from beginning to end, the evening was a
magnificent dance with the devil.
And what better
way to set the tone for these noir proceedings
than Modest Mussorgsky’s sprawling Night
On Bald Mountain? In what the composer had once called a “wicked prank” in
1867, the brass and percussion evoked the forces of thunder and lightning as the
strings recalled frenzied, biting winds swirling around a haunted mountaintop.
The orchestra delivered the music with such a sense of raw, strident urgency
that this terribly familiar work (included in Disney’s 1940 animated classic, Fantasia) sounded startlingly new.
If night terrors
can be said to have a humorous face, Malcom Arnold’s rarely performed Tam O’Shanter amply fit the bill. The
music was drawn from Scottish poet Robert Burns’ epic story of a hapless but
jolly drunkard, Tam from the town of Shanter, riding home atop his trusty mare,
Meg, on a stormy night after drinking at the pub. When he stops to peek inside
an abandoned church, he beholds a ghastly orgy of witches and demons dancing to
Scottish jigs and reels. Eyeing a young witch clad only in a revealing
undergarment called a “cutty-sark,” he lets out a loud and lascivious cry of
delight that prompts the hellish celebrants to give furious chase.
The thoroughly
Scottish-flavored score is a pastiche of often comical aural devices. The
orchestra seemed to be possessed by a delightfully naughty spirit as it
immersed us in evocative textures, at times in convincing imitations of a
bagpipe chorus. Amid stormy bursts from brass and percussion, bassoons lumbered
along like the inebriated Tam, and solo trombone hilariously voiced his drunken
salutation, “Weel done, cutty-sark!” Well done indeed.
Concluding the
evening’s first half was Totentanz (Dance
of Death), a symphonic poem for piano and orchestra by Franz Liszt. The
work is a masterpiece of virtuosic keyboard writing, built around a thematic
core of variations on Dies Irae (Day of
Wrath), the Gregorian plainchant associated with the Mass for the Dead.
Guest pianist Spencer Meyer was something of a force of nature here,
passionately articulating the relentless percussive thrust of the music. Imagine
the orchestra as a darkly colored canvas stretched taut. As it depicted the
dancing of ghosts and the haunted clattering of dry bones, it held its own
quite well against Meyers’ pounding glissandos and breathtaking arpeggios, all
executed with the fiery panache of a painter wielding a broad brush of
enchanted colors.
A relatively more
lyrical, though equally diabolical character was threaded through the following
selection, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse
Macabre. Here, the composer cast solo violin as the fiddle-playing devil. The
harmonic dissonance in the violin music is the result of intentionally tuning
down the top string a half step to enhance its ominous presence. In this role,
CSO Acting Concertmaster, Hanna Landrum, adopted an oddly quiet energy. Yet,
ironically enough, it was the palpable gentleness of her touch that made the
devil’s tune all the more eerie.
During the
evening’s final work, Liszt’s Mephistopheles,
the third movement of A Faust
Symphony, the music twists and writhes in a grotesque revelation of the
devil’s relentlessly taunting nature. But with the entry of a male choir in the
“Chorus Mysticus,” an ethereal light seems to cut through the darkness. The
Canton Symphony Men’s Chorus, under the direction of Dr. Britt Cooper, rendered
this drama of apotheosis with wondrous sonority. And the crystalline voice of
tenor Timothy Culver soared in a powerful embodiment of majestic and mystical
solemnity.
As if to add an
exclamation point to an already electrifying encounter, Maestro Zimmermann
surprised us all by leading the ensemble in a rousing encore - Charles Gounod’s
Funeral March of a Marionette. Alfred
Hitchcock would have surely approved.
PHOTOS: (top) Pianist
Spencer Meyer; (bottom) Tenor Timothy Culver
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