Canton Symphony Orchestra and Chorus: Redefining ‘Inspired’
By Tom Wachunas
For the final concert on April 23 in the
Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) MasterWorks series of the 2015-2016 season,
conducting duties were split. Rachel Waddell, CSO Associate Conductor, directed
the ensemble in Carl Maria von Weber’s Overture
to Oberon, and the Ohio premiere of Dreamtime
Ancestors by American composer Christopher Theofanidis. Rounding out this
eminently spirited program were Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, and Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, both works for orchestra and chorus, and both
conducted by CSO Chorus Director Britt Cooper.
In Waddell’s
vivacious rendering of Overture to
Oberon, there was charismatic fervor in her conducting style. At once
spunky and intimate, it was as if she thoughtfully absorbed every musical
passage - whether calm and enchanting, or turbulent – and at the same time
seemed to pour every note back into the ensemble. It was a sensibility eagerly
reciprocated by the ensemble as it responded with marvelous tonal depth and
palpable exuberance.
That same
chemistry was all the more apparent after intermission, in the Theofanidis work,
a tone poem in three movements, composed in 2015. As Waddell explained in her
introductory comments, Dreamtime
Ancestors is a reference to Australian aboriginal creation myths. The music
is a sweeping episodic journey, as visceral as it is ethereal, symbolizing the
fusion of past, present, and future into a single living entity containing the
stories and potential energy of all of us.
Indeed, the
orchestra was mesmerizing in its suggestions of primordial forces in constant
flux and realization. Throughout, there was the sensation of cyclic pulsing,
and at times an eerie mood of dissonant imminence. Then, in the second
movement, there’s an unearthly harmonic emergence, represented by the piercing
drone of the strings. Finally, in the movement called “Each Stone Speaks a
Poem,” there’s a sparkling brassy burst, a revelation. The earth’s crust is
talking. Call it the sound of timelessness.
Certainly not as cosmic in scope as the
Theofanidis work, Alexander Borodin’s Polovtsian
Dances still has a timeless character all of its own. Part of that character is no doubt due to one of its central
themes, a lovely melody now instantly familiar to us since being adopted for
“Stranger in Paradise,” from the 1953 Broadway hit, Kismet. In any event, the performance here, resplendent in
orchestral and choral color, was a wild and vigorous end to the evening.
While all of the program
selections were surely inspired and inspiring enough, it was the second piece
on the program, the wholly – and holy - immersive performance of Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light), that was arguably
the most transfixing of the evening. It
is a modern work, composed in 1997, that recalls aspects of the traditional
Requiem Mass. But there is little if anything of the morbidity that we find in
some famous predecessors’ Requiems. This cathartic masterpiece is all about
Divine light and its power to transform the darkness of grief and sorrow into
peace.
There were moments
throughout the five movements, played without pause, when Britt Cooper’s
conducting suggested, interestingly enough, the impassioned and authoritative
promptings of an intercessory priest sustaining a superb aural balance between
orchestra and singers so that both could soar without one clouding the other.
The Canton Symphony Chorus, combined with Walsh University Chamber Singers, pronounced
the beautiful polyphonic Latin chants with astonishing clarity and precision,
infusing them with genuine solemnity and unfettered joy.
Is it possible for
choral magnificence of this kind to transcend the incidentals of its own substance
and become something else? Absolutely,
though I’m somewhat at a loss for naming it. Suffice to say that whatever we
may choose to call such a phenomenon, it wasn’t simply great music that we in
the audience experienced here. This was a baptism.