07
Mar
2005
There is a place where elephants flit through the trees, where dignified violists play toy trumpets, and where a visit to the catacombs follows a trip to the park. The Quad City Symphony Orchestra led us on a journey through our imaginations on March 6, and the destinations were of the most unique sort.
The Quad City Symphony Children’s Chorus joined the orchestra for a concert that, according to conductor Donald Schleicher, was designed to appeal to those seeking to “die young, but who wish to delay it as long as possible.”
Kazoos, rattles, bells, a plastic trumpet, and other unconventional instruments filled the toy section of the orchestra for Franz Josef Haydn’s Toy Symphony in C Major. The viola section, oddly left out of the score, took up the instruments and made the audience and the orchestra members smile. The stately orchestra melody provided a great backdrop to the comically serious toy performers, who whistled, blew, rattled, and banged their way through the three movements of the piece, ending with an exuberant finale.
Next, Schleicher invited the “real kids” to the stage. The Quad City Symphony Children’s Chorus marched in accompanied by Georges Bizet’s “March of the Street Children,” taken from the opera Carmen, and then performed Folk Songs of the Four Seasons by Ralph Vaughan Williams and a piece commissioned by the orchestra from British composer Andrew Carter, Three Nonsensical Songs. In addition to performing all the pieces from memory, the chorus members performed articulately, carefully followed dynamics, and not once did I see attention waver from Schleicher’s baton.
Folk Songs was an apt musical description of the seasons, complete with a cold-sounding spring, jubilant summer, dance-like autumn, and festive winter. For Nonsensical Songs, composer Carter took poems by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and an anonymous author (to which Carter himself added a few stanzas) and set them to eccentric melodies with fun instrumentation, including a saxophone, whistles, muted trumpets, and sharp block strikes. The vocalists obviously enjoyed singing the strange words as much as we enjoyed hearing them. The playful waves of “They Went to Sea in a Sieve,” the warm, smooth-textured harmonies of “Beautiful Soup,” and the heavy flight of “The Elephant Is a Bonnie Bird” combined for a fun trip to a world very different from our own.
Carter was in attendance at the concert and, after receiving his own applause and acclamation, lauded the children’s chorus and its conductor, Steven Jobman, for a well-executed performance.
The journey into the imagination proceeded with an imaginary visit to an art gallery where the orchestra brought each artistic work to life. For Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the lights dimmed and a huge screen descended behind the musicians onto which pictures were projected. A tribute to Mussorgsky’s artist friend, Victor Hartmann, the piece contains 11 disparate movements connected by the “promenade,” a recurring interlude symbolic of the short walk between works in an art exhibit.
The first movement was a portrayal of The Gnome, a rough picture of a short being with large eyes and twisted body. As the orchestra performed the scurrying, harsh, straining piece, the picture took on an ominous quality, and I could really imagine the painful, heavy walk of the subject.
Next, the orchestra portrayed the cold background of The Castle, while a saxophone brought the only human element, a blurry man, to life with a soulful melody. The trodding brass of Bydlo, or “The Ox Cart,” began faintly, and as it passed became painfully loud, complete with snares and cymbals until it receded once again over the horizon. Catacombs was another of my favorites, full of deep, foreboding brass chords. Other movements were descriptions of artwork portraying disparate subjects from a marketplace, in which women haggled, to a Ballet of Unhatched Chicks, in which children dressed up as half-hatched chickens made an uncanny appearance. The final movement, The Great Gate of Kiev, started as a powerful hymn-like piece that crescendoed and dropped to nothing several times before the final triumphant chords shook the hall.
After the final notes died away, I heard the young girl behind me breathe, “That was cool,” and I agree wholeheartedly. The audience demanded an encore, and the Quad City Symphony performed a short, dance-like melody, featuring a beautiful unison cello section solo.
Kazoos, rattles, bells, a plastic trumpet, and other unconventional instruments filled the toy section of the orchestra for Franz Josef Haydn’s Toy Symphony in C Major. The viola section, oddly left out of the score, took up the instruments and made the audience and the orchestra members smile. The stately orchestra melody provided a great backdrop to the comically serious toy performers, who whistled, blew, rattled, and banged their way through the three movements of the piece, ending with an exuberant finale.
Next, Schleicher invited the “real kids” to the stage. The Quad City Symphony Children’s Chorus marched in accompanied by Georges Bizet’s “March of the Street Children,” taken from the opera Carmen, and then performed Folk Songs of the Four Seasons by Ralph Vaughan Williams and a piece commissioned by the orchestra from British composer Andrew Carter, Three Nonsensical Songs. In addition to performing all the pieces from memory, the chorus members performed articulately, carefully followed dynamics, and not once did I see attention waver from Schleicher’s baton.
Folk Songs was an apt musical description of the seasons, complete with a cold-sounding spring, jubilant summer, dance-like autumn, and festive winter. For Nonsensical Songs, composer Carter took poems by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and an anonymous author (to which Carter himself added a few stanzas) and set them to eccentric melodies with fun instrumentation, including a saxophone, whistles, muted trumpets, and sharp block strikes. The vocalists obviously enjoyed singing the strange words as much as we enjoyed hearing them. The playful waves of “They Went to Sea in a Sieve,” the warm, smooth-textured harmonies of “Beautiful Soup,” and the heavy flight of “The Elephant Is a Bonnie Bird” combined for a fun trip to a world very different from our own.
Carter was in attendance at the concert and, after receiving his own applause and acclamation, lauded the children’s chorus and its conductor, Steven Jobman, for a well-executed performance.
The journey into the imagination proceeded with an imaginary visit to an art gallery where the orchestra brought each artistic work to life. For Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the lights dimmed and a huge screen descended behind the musicians onto which pictures were projected. A tribute to Mussorgsky’s artist friend, Victor Hartmann, the piece contains 11 disparate movements connected by the “promenade,” a recurring interlude symbolic of the short walk between works in an art exhibit.
The first movement was a portrayal of The Gnome, a rough picture of a short being with large eyes and twisted body. As the orchestra performed the scurrying, harsh, straining piece, the picture took on an ominous quality, and I could really imagine the painful, heavy walk of the subject.
Next, the orchestra portrayed the cold background of The Castle, while a saxophone brought the only human element, a blurry man, to life with a soulful melody. The trodding brass of Bydlo, or “The Ox Cart,” began faintly, and as it passed became painfully loud, complete with snares and cymbals until it receded once again over the horizon. Catacombs was another of my favorites, full of deep, foreboding brass chords. Other movements were descriptions of artwork portraying disparate subjects from a marketplace, in which women haggled, to a Ballet of Unhatched Chicks, in which children dressed up as half-hatched chickens made an uncanny appearance. The final movement, The Great Gate of Kiev, started as a powerful hymn-like piece that crescendoed and dropped to nothing several times before the final triumphant chords shook the hall.
After the final notes died away, I heard the young girl behind me breathe, “That was cool,” and I agree wholeheartedly. The audience demanded an encore, and the Quad City Symphony performed a short, dance-like melody, featuring a beautiful unison cello section solo.
