Music of the Spheres
By Tom Wachunas
Describing this
season’s final concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra at Umstattd Performing
Arts Hall on April 26 brings to mind a bevy of feel-good bromides. Still, none
would be more apropos than “out of this world.”
Everything
that makes this orchestra truly noteworthy was in full force. With just two
works on the program – Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter”, and Holst’s The Planets, the orchestra under Maestro
Gerhardt Zimmermann thrilled the capacity audience with its broad palette of
commanding sonority, astonishing technical virtuosity and gripping
expressionism.
Zimmermann’s
reading of Mozart’s greatest symphonic accomplishment was brilliantly balanced
in its moderate pacing, precision of textures, and palpable affection for
Mozart’s intricate, complex mixing of thematic motifs. That intricacy is
clearly apparent in the first movement’s melding of majestic pomp with gentle
graciousness. Even more so, the second movement is a sumptuous triad of
contemplative, fiery and calming moods.
But it’s in the
ebullient finale where Mozart pulled out all the fugal stops as it were. The
coda is a magnificent soundscape of five interwoven melodic elements and the orchestra
met its dizzying contrapuntal challenges with remarkable clarity and authority.
This was no headlong rush into perfunctory flamboyance, but rather a stunning
surrender of sorts - an impassioned caress of the breathtaking power of the
music itself.
While Gustav
Holst’s The Planets is certainly less
complex than Mozart’s “Jupiter”
symphony in terms of its seven movements’ thematic structures, the work is
nonetheless Olympian in its dramatic thrust. Augmenting the already cinematic character of
the music were the gorgeous HD projections on a giant screen above the
orchestra. They were originally created by filmmaker Duncan Copp in cooperation
with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratories for a 2009 production by the Houston
Symphony. The images were a constantly moving, hypnotic montage of photos from
satellites, surface rovers and computer generated animations of vast alien
landscapes.
The orchestra has
never been more startlingly thunderous, particularly during the brutish,
menacing tumult of the first movement,
Mars, the Bringer of War, or more
committed to brassy, heroic jubilance than in the fourth movement, Jupiter. Balancing out these and other
moments of rattling aural intensity were many powerful passages throughout the
work wherein strings, winds and percussion soared into lyricism so crisp and
shimmering that the air in the auditorium seemed to crystalize.
As if defying the
beautiful mass and poetic gravity of the previous six movements, Holst
fashioned his final movement, Neptune,
the Mystic, not as an outward burst of otherworldly wonder, but a diaphanous
falling away of melodic fragments.
Like so many
meteoric trails of light, the orchestra evanesced into distant harmonies. Then,
amid the instrumental fading, the faintest of eerie intonations from an
offstage women’s chorus gradually emerged into a haunting, wordless cadence
that in turn progressively drifted to nothing.
This silence of the
spheres was indeed a potent, mystical ending. Yet days after the concert, it
continues to speak volumes in my memory – not so much of cosmic phenomena, but
of the mesmerizing phenomenon that is the Canton Symphony Orchestra.
